Thumb Typing

 

As an eighth grader, planning my HS freshman curriculum, I sat with my mother and guidance counselor in his cramped office.  He commented that my teachers invariably complained about my penmanship.  Legible handwriting meant more in the 1960s than it does now, when everyone has a keyboard at hand.  He glanced at my grades, then thought he would amuse us by taking me to a branch point.  Become a doctor or enroll in typing class.  Even future doctors had to write in essay books throughout high school and college.  The next fall, I shuttled just a few doors over at the end of my scheduled daily English class to a room filled with Royal and Underwood Olivetti office model manual typewriters.  Too big for anyone to steal.  None bolted to the desks.  My assigned seat brought me to a Royal, frame color robin's egg blue.  They prepped us for accuracy and for speed.  Mediocre on accuracy, though I would probably surpass anybody else in the class in a spelling bee.  Speed limited by the same manual dexterity challenges that got me mediocre grades in art and shop classes throughout Junior High.  My speed lagged behind everyone else's.  I probably could find most of the keys without peeking at them, but the mid-teen me was too insecure to risk typos, which happened anyway.

I got by.  My father had a manual typewriter from college that became our home device.  From then on, I typed my own papers.  When my mother typed them for me, the Greeks always appeared as Freeks.  Proofreading and white-out correction fluid would come later.  When I typed my own papers, the teachers often nudged the grade up a couple of points for the correct spelling and few typos.

I college, I bought an electric typewriter, one that allowed the line return with the hit of a button with my right pinkie instead of a lever to the left of the platen.  It served me for decades, until the advantages of word processing to touch typing became so overwhelming that electric typewriters disappeared, as did the J.J. Newberry store where I purchased it.  That skill of knowing which finger went with which letter served me well, though I never got the hang of numbers on the top line.  The numeric pad to the right of the letters compensated that effortlessly, as I had much practice with an electric adding machine long before hand calculators took over.

Desktops, then laptops.  No remedial effort needed.  Tablets with the keyboard as part of the screen, though, returned me to single finger hunt and peck typing.  And the smartphone, QWERTY keyboard of tiny letters smaller than the tips of my fingers, restored me to the same slow speed, poor accuracy of my Junior High years.  I'm the slowest again.

As I watch kids, though, including my own young adults, and HS and college age kids on buses and planes and other public places, they type fast.  It is not the touch typing that they made me learn in 8th grade, nor is it the nine finger tapping of a keyboard with real keys, whether desktop or laptop.  Instead, the speed comes with two finger typing, the thumb of each hand while the iPhone or Android cradles in a palm.  My OLLI course list does not offer a class in how to do this.  There are tutorials, though.  They date back to the early days of the iPhone.  YouTube videos.  Written monographs.  Maybe they even tutor this in grade school or other places where kids that young shouldn't have phones.

It's tempting to try my hand at mastery, though lack of this skill has not been detrimental. Acquiring this proficiency might be if I use it to text people incessantly.  Still, I cannot help but admire all those young folks tapping their pseudokeys at an awesome rate, even if they would be better off using their devices less.  Like my own entry to touch typing, now sixty years ago, skills enhance with practice.  They become useful, if not essential.  And at present, my left thumb remains mostly dormant on a standard keyboard.  I should try to find a useful purpose for that left-out digit.