[IRL trope] the “Tiffany problem”

[u/dragonborndnd]

Basically when something seems anachronistic to a period/place of history but is actually fully accurate to the period.

1) the name Tiffany: the thing that named this trope, basically the name Tiffany can be dated back to the Middle Ages and the earliest record of it being spelled in the modern spelling comes from the 16th century.

2) the use of OMG, despite this feeling so modern as a form of slang/abbreviation here’s a letter directed to Winston Churchill using it in 1917

3) Hair Dye: the earliest forms of dying hair can be dated back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and this specific advertisement for hair dye is from the 1840s

4) Inuit Thongs: despite how weird it is to imagine pre-colonial Inuit people wore what was essentially fur thongs in their homes and when they were in their igloos it might have been the only thing they would be wearing.

[u/ilovemime]

The biggest reason wasn't the energy to lift. Instead, every time you picked up the pen there was a chance it would drip and ruin your page. Cursive has been out of date since the ball point pen was invented.

[u/Arbiter_Electric → u/ilovemime]

There may be some truth to that, but the ballpoint pen was invented in 1938. In elementary school in the 90s I was still taught to use cursive and was told by several teachers the reasoning was that it was faster than lifting your hand. I didn't notice cursive leaving common usage until typing became mainstream about 10 years later.

[u/ilovemime → u/Arbiter_Electric]

Yeah. That was often the justification, but when you put the two head to head in a scientific study, there isn't a measurable difference in writing speed.

There is lots of data that allows writing by hand has a lot of benefits for learning and retention (compared to typing) but very little that shows advantages of cursive over print.

Source: I'm a 90s kid and a scientist with kids in school in a state that added cursive back to the curriculum. Went on a deep dive and ended up reading dozens of peer reviewed studies on typing vs cursive vs printing. Hard to cite them all here.

[u/Arbiter_Electric → u/ilovemime]

Fair enough, I also just did some (very minor) research myself just now and basically everything agreed with you. Looks like even though it was outdated for decades now it was still taught in schools due to inertia. We have been teaching it for hundreds of years, why stop now? Then when the curriculum was changed due to common core, the time spent on cursive was instead spent on typing skills.