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Comment by Boogie_Man | Hacker News Reader

A few years back I decided to finally learn correct cursive so I was able to sign my name to documents correctly. When I discovered there were multiple types of cursive, I landed on Kurrent (the predecessor of Sütterlin) and now frequently sign my name with it to the general dissatisfaction of everyone in my life.

I'm sure there's some sort of point I'm making about the absurdity of a signature being used to verify anything (when the nice old lady volunteering at the polling station makes me sign again because it doesn't quite look like my signature even though I have photo ID and have arrived in person at the correct polling location I want to do a backflip, but I of course don't because I want to be nice to the old lady), but mostly it just makes me smile.

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Danish-style kurrent is the final boss of my genealogy research. There's a nice image on the Wikipedia page. Look at the a, e, o, r, s, v, æ and ø in lower case, and imagine that written by a Danish priest with early parkinson's and/or being drunk.

There's some poetic beauty in the difficulties of understanding the nuances of spoken Danish be matched by the same in reading. :)

Once when interrailing I asked my compartment-mates (compartmates?) for their languages' worst tongue-twisters. And the Danish one was God-awful.

Danish tungebrækkere: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungebr%C3%A6kker Jeg plukker frisk frugt med en brugt frugtplukker.

Why does the c have a breve above it!?

> I landed on Kurrent

This is madness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent#/media/File:Deutsche_K...

> now frequently sign my name with it to the general dissatisfaction of everyone in my life.

When I was a kid, I thought there was a special way to sign things, given how everyone's signatures looked like elaborate Lissajous curves. For awhile, once I had to start signing things, I took care to make sure my name was legible and consistent.

Then I realized I could just make a little wavy squiggle, and nobody cared. Eventually I realized that most signatures, I didn't even have to do a wavy squiggle - the credit card machines at stores would be perfectly happy to accept a straight line, or just a first initial, or a drawing of a kitty-cat.

A friend of my uncle used to sign his cheques "Mickey mouse"

My understanding is that under English law (probably inherited by the US) anything you intend to act as you signature is legally your signature. So the joke was on him, because his signature was Mickey Mouse.

This goes back to the days where people were illiterate and would sign by writing an X. But that was fine, because they only had to sign a handful of legal documents in their entire life and could remember each one.

For a time in the years around 2008 I would sign my credit card receipts "Ron Paul," which eventually resulted in a sternly-worded letter from Wells Fargo that carried no legal weight but did lead to me discontinuing the silly little campaign.

I don't get the punchline. Are you not named that? Did they care that you signed by writing a random person's name, or were you imitating a specific person you knew or so?

Ron Paul was a US presidential candidate in 2008, so I guess that's who they were signing as. Especially given their username...

Oh! Right, I had looked at the username to see if it was related but even that didn't make the name click. I must just have never heard it before

The polling place example makes me smile. I was once asked to re-sign six times. None of the six matched the reference. Then I was offered the option to just change the reference.

I asked if they would just accept the testimony of somebody who had known me since kindergarten. The pollsters on either side of the one "helping" me laughed and called me by my childhood nickname to say "no". Half of the people in the room had known me for most or all of my life.

But the lady in front of me didn't think my signature matched enough and wouldn't accept my state-issued tamper-proof photo ID. She did show me the reference signature and asked if I could imitate it. Or I could just change the reference signature.

I've never had to sign while voting. This seems bizarre. How do people with Parkinson’s vote? Or other motor issues? I have the motor skills of a spastic five-year old, and my signature ("signature") never matches exactly.

i learned kurrent out of interest but also to improve my handwriting. the straight lines and sharp corners are a lot easier to write than the round lines of regular hand writing so i got good results with less effort than with regular handwriting which eventually motivated me to improve my regular hand writing too. i also had access to a collection of old dip pens with various types of nibs allowing me to really duplicate the writing style of the time, if only at primary school level. eventually i adapted my signature too, but unlike you i never got any backslash for that.

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