Let me tell you a not-so-little story. It involves a four-letter word, but I won’t reveal that just yet, no sirree.

Before I went to nursery school – back in the days when a single year of vague socialisation was seen as quite adequate for taming small children before they were dumped on hapless Grade 1 teachers – I fretted that I was woefully unprepared for school. I didn’t know how to write!

I would stare hopefully at the envelopes that arrived in our letterbox: handwritten ones, typed ones, plenty of them brown with funny little tracing-paper windows that made mom blanch. I would faithfully copy the letters on the typed ones but was only able to replicate the cursive ones by doing bouncy up-and-down wavy lines that (I hoped) would be intelligible to readers, somehow.

Continue reading “Four letters” →