this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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You can write regular print letters joined up which is pretty common. Cursive letters however are approximations of letters that don’t look a whole lot like their print counterparts.
The word "cursive" as it colloquially understood in America is the exact alphabet posted in the above image.
If you ask almost any American GenX or older "hey, what is the word for 'joined up writing' ", they will answer "cursive", and they will be specifically thinking of that precise style.
Meanwhile I have two kids who JUST learned to read and they are both able to read cursive. They have not been formally taught this style, and any attempt they'd take at writing it would likely be an illegible mess, but they absolutely can understand it.
Exactly my point, cursive refers to that exact style of joined-up writing. It is not a word which refers to any and all joined-up writing. If you ask almost any American what cursive is, they’ll point to the style as shown in the first image.
If you ask almost any American what “joined-up writing” is, they’ll point to the style in the second image. Because if you were referring to Cursive, you would have said cursive, not joined-up writing.
If you avoid using the very common specific term for something in favor of a less common, more general term, people will assume you’re not referring to the more specific thing, because you’ve gone out of your way to not use the specific term.