Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty win an Honourable Badge of Merit, not for chiding us that our handwriting is spastic, nor for implying that this is due to a degenerating decade and a half of instant messaging and texting, but for finally explaining to me why the fuck it’s so hard to read traditional “cursive,” or, as I think of it, confusing word spaghetti.

The answer is that we read the tops of characters to determine their meanings. We don’t read the bottoms. Loop all the tops together, and you have a senseless bird-language. Write the upper halves of letters cleanly, and you have the language of Samuel Johnson, bell hooks, and fictional wise-acre Peter Griffin. (Loop the bottoms of words together, and you may have ill graffiti. Depends on your handstyle.)