28/07/2014

Here’s a test. What does the following word say?

It’s not a dash. I know what you’re thinking, and the fourth character is not a dash. It’s a legit letter. Can you figure out which one?

Of course you can’t, it’s a horizontal bloody line. There’s nothing in the Roman alphabet shaped anything like this – and let’s not forget the fact that it’s about triple the width of every other character. If this image were used as a CAPTCHA, anyone in their right mind would fail.

So think of my last two weeks as an extended, advanced-level CAPTCHA examination. As mentioned in the previous article, I have spent large tracts of my time in Customer Service collecting personal information from loyalty card applications and entering it into the store’s database. Poor handwriting has helped punctuate the monotony of the task, but sometimes only by virtue of providing a new, more infuriating exercise, and to this extent it is both a blessing and a curse.

In reading through piles of filled out forms, I am occasionally led to think of the German word for bad handwriting, which is Klaue. This is a good example of the evocative metaphors and language-internal borrowings so common to German* – in its literal sense, Klaue means “claw”. For me, it conjures up the image of a figure hunched over a desk, clumsily clutching a writing instrument between overgrown fingernails and using it to produce a jagged, unintelligible scrawl.

I have seen much of the German Klaue in the past days. When exposed to poor handwriting in large quantities, you begin to learn that the expression of “deciphering”** it is more than just a throwaway dramatisation. With email and postal addresses at stake, and the misinterpretation of a single character risking invalidating hard-won customer information, I’ve needed to develop procedures and techniques to make sense of the senseless. These have included grouping sections of wild pen strokes and mapping them to commonly occurring letter clusters, or trying to correlate the more legible letters in the script with the scratchier parts. When you eventually solve the puzzle, it’s the feeling of recovering a corrupted file, and there is an appreciable sense of satisfaction to it.

There is frustration too. Frustration that some people can’t write their own names and addresses clearly (combined with my suspicion that these same people take some perverse pride in the idiosyncrasy of their incomprehensible style). To some extent, poor handwriting can perhaps be forgiven when the content of the message is interesting, urgent or profound. But it’s a complacent individual who thinks that their home address and phone number fall into one of those categories.

I have enjoyed it, though. Thanks to the highly international Alsterhaus clientele, I now possess gratifyingly inconsequential skills in the identification of nationality through handwriting, whether it be the block-like Chinese rendition of the Roman alphabet, or the neat, tightly italicised cursive of a female Muscovian hand. Only trends, to be sure, and there are no perfectly consistent patterns, but then consistency would spoil the fun. And all the while, plenty of Klaue to keep things vexatious.

It was an ‘m’, by the way – the word spelled ‘Marmstorfer’. I mean, it didn’t, but you know. Customer’s always right. I leave you now with the unhinged handwriting of a man called Ulrich – this is his take on the number ‘15’.

*Though it’s a rubbish example of the better-known German practice of word compounding. For this, note Sauklaue, which adds the word Sau (“sow, pig”) to the original Klaue to produce roughly the same meaning, but with that swine-obsessed Germanic edge.

**The Germans use a similar word for “deciphering handwriting”, namely enträtseln. It literally means “to un-puzzle”. Or, I guess, "to de-cipher". Insightful, Walter.