Did Elizabeth I have more time on her hands, or have standards slipped?
A letter leaked to the press from Vince Cable [note: UK Government Minister] criticising the government was signed off by the business secretary with a distinctive moniker akin to a smiley face. So how significant is a signature?
The odd-looking sign-off became a talking point this week, with some people joking about what it might say about Vince Cable[British politician].
Is he trying to be cool? Is he too busy?
Maybe he just likes to draw a caricature of a smiling whale at the end of his letters as a reminder to himself and all of us that we are not alone on this planet and all our decisions have impacts on the eco-system.
Whatever it is, his squiggle is sufficiently odd to have people resurrecting that old chestnut: trying to predict personality from handwriting.
I became aware of the "science" of graphology around the time I had to produce my first signature. This was when I opened my first account of any description with a financial institution.
Signing an application form for a Sammy Squirrel Savings Account in the Irish Post Office is not exactly the same as inking a merger between Glencore and Xstrata but nevertheless it was a milestone of sorts.
I didn't make what one would call a cool signature. I just wrote my name a little bit faster. And that is still the case today. Someone analysing my signature now would conclude that I've no strong feelings about anything and that I may not even be a real person.
It's too late to change now and the lack of an impressive signature has affected my life. One of the reasons why I consciously shun the fame that would have otherwise occurred as a natural result of my talent, is that it would take too long for me to sign "all those books".
As for the rest of my letters, they soon came into focus. My older brother got a book from the library about graphology and a whole new world of navel-gazing opened up. Apparently my backward slanting writing was an indication that I was too focused on the past.
That was uncanny. I did sometimes think about the day before. I started rotating my pages anti-clockwise and immediately felt the past fall like a weight off my 13-year-old shoulders.
Large loops on the below-the-line letters were, according to my brother, a sure sign of a "total pervert". I clamped down on that dark side of me straight away.
For a few weeks when nothing else was happening, I gradually addressed each aspect of my handwriting until, according to the graphology book, I was a cross between Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe and Carl Lewis.
You don't see so much about graphology now - a succession of studies in recent decades have emptied a vat of scorn over its ability to describe and predict personality, but perhaps the biggest threat to graphology is not scepticism. It is the March of Time.
With the advent of computers, fewer and fewer people are doing any handwriting beyond their middle-school years, so their penmanship isn't evolving beyond the teenage stage of development either.
This would lead graphology experts analysing future populations to conclude that most of the subjects studied are moody, hard to get up in the mornings and think their parents are an embarrassment (I know what you mean, especially when they're trying to be cool).
Against this background, future pseudoscientific analysis will have to look at our computer-based evidence in order to jump to dodgy conclusions. Take fonts for example. If you want to spot the deranged and the psychopathic now, start with anyone who types exclusively in Wingdings.
Those who employ Comic Sans are the kind of people who want to make dull activities sound fun. A Comic Sans user may also display passive aggressive tendencies particularly when highlighting falling standards in the canteen. "These cups don't wash themselves" looks cheery in A4 on the wall, but inside the author is a seething cauldron of rage.
Times New Roman? This person is a no-nonsense individual. They believe if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well and no amount of dressing it up or "design" is going to change that fact. Or it could be someone who has not worked out how to change the font in Microsoft Word.
Apart from font there are other tell-tale signs of personality traits. If someone uses lots of emoticons they're not confident in their ability to convey their meaning to others. DO THEY WRITE IN BLOCK CAPITALS followed by a parade of exclamation marks that looks like a picket fence? Then they are someone who comments on an article on a website. You can leave yours below.
READERS’ COMMENTS
9 HOURS AGO
//Apparently my backward slanting writing was an indication that I was too focused on the past.\\
Or, like me, you are left-handed and learned to write in the days of fountain pens and needed a method so that you didn't smudge what you had just written. Turning the paper clockwise 90 degrees and writing in "columns" was so much more comfortable than dislocating one's wrist, elbow and shoulder.
7 HOURS AGO
Handwriting analysis has actually been used in the corporate environment to consider whether or not a person was right for a job. Hmm, crosses his T's in a very sharp upward slant. This man is obviously psychotic and a danger to others... Please let us be rid of this ridiculous pseudo-science. You might as well judge a person's mental fitness based on his star sign.
6 HOURS AGO
Brilliant article. made me laugh. I remember being around 14 and getting caught practising my signature in school by a teacher. She told me that it showed a certain degree of self obsession. I replied that i didn't have a clue what she was on about..... I was just practising for when I became famous. - she didn't see the joke.
6 HOURS AGO
I just scribble really fast. I hate being in a queue (line) waiting for the really s l o w person to s i g n their name just right. Dotting the i's and crossing the t's. As for the 'experts'? Go get a life and put an end to your clap-trap!
5 HOURS AGO
My signature is unreadable, because I developed it in my teens and it was too much hassle to change for banks etc. I reckon you can tell that a woman is married(or using a married name) by looking at her signature as it is more likely to be readable because she developed it later in life and had time to think about taking care over making it presentable.
Taken from the BBC.
Taken from the BBC.
A signature is a mark or sign made by an individual on an instrument or document to signify knowledge, approval, acceptance, or obligation. Its function is to validate a writing , and to bind the individual signing the writing by the provisions contained in the document. The documents are for example a financial services or on letters, documents , checks , security documents are validated by ones signatures. The signatures on a document are considered proof that one has consented to the terms and conditions laid down in the document and further that he has read or the contents have bread out to him in and he has affixed his signatures thereto in token of its correctness .Signatures are also included in class absent and personal letters. Not many people realized but signatures are actually ours and only we have the right to change it. However, what if they want to verify the document that they’ve previously signed and “prove” it wasn’t them who signed it.
ReplyDeleteI personally don’t like signatures. Well, if it’s for hobby and personal reasons sure you can have it, but for an important identification? I don’t think so! Signatures have always been a puzzle to me, how can something so significant and detriment in our society as a proof of our identification (bank accounts, id cards, driver licenses, checks, and much more) be something so abstract. As depicted in the article, a signature can be half a smiley face or a half page doodle; shouldn’t there be a rule of some sort? or at least a class in elementary schools teaching children the importance of signatures. A clueless eighteen-year-old could be stuck with his badly written name that can easily be copied.
ReplyDeleteThere are already more reliable substitutes for signatures. Fingerprint censors and Face recognition are technologies that are advance enough to be reliable. I’m guessing the usage of signatures is just some sort of tradition that can easily be change.
I remember being so excited on creating my own signature, I thought it was a very adult thing to do. I asked my mom to guide me through because she had her own unique signature, that represented her last name, not her first. She said to me that a signature could describe one’s personality. I never believed her until latter I saw all sorts of signature and somehow I could quite determine how important the person is by their signature, and the letters where they sign it too (of course!). I’ve always been interested on the studies in Graphology as it can show so much of a person’s identity just by their handwriting. I guess it also implies on signatures. I made my signature as a representation of what I wish to be, a cipher of my last name, Aisyah, with the A imitating the shape of a star, to remind myself to always strive for the stars. I also replace the dot in ‘i’ with a heart-shape to indicate (as cheesy as it sounds) how love plays a big role as how I am as a person.
ReplyDeleteWhy are signatures so important?
ReplyDeleteOne is bound by the contents of the writing contained and embodied in a document to which one affixes his signatures.
“a signature is a mark or sign made by an individual on an instrument or document to signify knowledge, approval, acceptance, or obligation."
It's purpose:
“to authenticate a writing, and to bind the individual signing the writing by the provisions contained in the document."
All documents in financial services or on letters, records, checks, security documents are validated by one's signatures.
The signatures on a document are considered prima facie proof that one has consented to the terms and conditions laid down in the paper and further that he has read or the contents have bread out to him in, and he has affixed his signatures to that in token of its correctness. Signatures can make something more expensive, and that’s why signatures so important.
I think signatures are very important because many institution like the government or business entity use signature to ratify important documents. Signature does not have to be beautiful, but one thing for sure, it has to be hard to duplicate. Sometimes, there are several cases where people with bad intention that duplicate someone’s signature to forge false documents for personal gains. So, having a smiley face as a signature is not okay especially if you are a government employee that handling many important documents.
ReplyDeleteI am not entirely sure about someone’s personality can be defined from their signature. Someone with bold signature usually can be described as a strong and powerful person. It is likely to be true but not all person with bold signature is strong and powerful. My signature is just my name in cursive handwriting and I think it can describe my laziness and lack of creativity.
According to typographical studies, signatures can reveal so much about a person. Signatures could epitomise one’s attitude in carrying life out, just by judging the shapes and the lines. Admittedly, I have struggled to find the ‘perfect‘ signature; maybe it was a reflection of me trying to find who I really was, until I found the one that I felt was the best one. I often envied my friends’ signatures that really look firm, and sophisticated, which made wonder where they got their signatures from. In this day and age however, due to the extensive use of biometric technologies such as fingerprint scanner, retina recognition, and so on and so forth, signatures are merely for the formality essence that is instilled in it ever since its known conception in 1098, which belongs to Spanish nobleman and military leader El Cid. To what extent signatures are important, however, vary between each and every individual’s perceptions towards it.
ReplyDeleteSignature is defined as a person’s name, written in a distinctive manner; a legal form of identification or authorization. Signatures are the most practiced and therefore the most automatic or habitual example of one’s writing behavior; good signatures usually exhibit one’s best level of writing skills. Nowadays, signatures are not as important as it used to be back in the day. Signatures were very important because there was a threat regarding money handling, people used to withdraw money only sparely; keeping money at homes was still pretty much in vogue, and the money did not change hands that fast as happens today, so it was feasible to compare signatures through account cards. Modern-day signatures are not as important as they used to be. Their relatively low importance in commercial and financial transactions owes to the fact that there are now numerous ways of detecting fraud other than via signatures. For example, you cannot use a debit or credit card without a pin number.
ReplyDeleteSignature still the most crucial thing since nowadays. In Indonesia, signature uses for every important thing, such as national identity card, driver’s license, school report card, and so on. Even though, for some informal agreement letter, like an agreement letter not to wrangle again with our siblings, it uses the assignment to make the letter more valid. Therefore, in this comment, I would like to discuss the importance of signature by discussing these questions: a lot of technology development, is signature still relevant for nowadays? how about the positive and negative sides for this matter? So, all solution for each question will be revealed in this comment.
ReplyDeleteBased on Wikipedia, the signature is a handwritten (and often stylized) depiction of someone's name, nickname, or even a simple "X" or another mark that a person writes on documents as a proof of identity and intent. Actually, the assignment came from the ancient scribe at around 3100 BC.
But, at that time, the signature was not a real mark like nowadays, they used words and symbols to denote identity.
DeleteFor the first time, a signature was used for parliament in 1677. It was used to validate the state of frauds in the English parliament and that made the signature the everyday marker it is today. By the time, for America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776, John Hancock make the signature as a binding contract and used widely around the world. Fast forward to the 1980s and technology was already rapidly changing the role of the signature. But the main purpose is helping to reduce fraud and protect personal security. By 2000, US president Bill Clinton had signed into law the E-sign act, validating electronic contracts and paving the way for eSignature technologies in businesses around the world.
See from its definition, I agree if signature still be a relevant thing for acceptance, vital documents, and it still uses until nowadays.
I think, the using of signature, such a tradition since it was used for the contract in that time. It shows some uniqueness of the person. We believe that every signature has their uniqueness, so, absolutely, it is different. Like what the article gives, although the signature is not complicated, just use one line and some dots there, it will be fine. But, the risk for that signature is easy to be imitated. Someone who success imitate your signature, they can access everything, if the passcode just uses a signature. Moreover, in this modern era, everyone can access everything easily. Imitation is a convenient thing to do. Remember, nowadays a lot of company use the electronic signature, or also called e-signatures, to verify our identity on an electronic file, such as sales agreement, some contracts, and so on.
DeleteIn summary, the signature will be fine for our secure since we make it unique and different from each other.
Everyone of course has their own signature. Signature is like one of the thing that makes people different. Each people has different signature from one and another. But some people also only use "paraf" instead of their own make signature because of many reasons. Maybe they are to lazy to make one or else. Having a difficult signature makes it difficult to copy by other people. Well, sometimes people tend to copy other people's signature to do a certain thing. For example, if a student has a bad grade on his or her test, and the teacher asks the student to get a signature from their parents for the test, so the parents will know about the result of the test. But, the student copy his or her parent's signature because the signature is easy to copy. It makes a person to do an inappropriate thing. The unique of signature is that, it can be used to see your personality. Some people who learn how to see personality from a person's signature, usually can see the person's personaluty pretty accurate. I wonder how they do that. But, it seems it is pretty popular now. If i go to bazaar or other event, there is usually a stand that provides service to see a personality through signature.
ReplyDeleteI think signatures are very unique. I remember when I was in elementary and I really wanted to have my own signature. I would see my parents’ signatures and how they do it so quick, and I really wanted to do it too. I remember creating so many different signatures and changing them a lot when I was little. The style of the signatures I drew can also be considered really childish and ‘cute’. Sometimes, my friends and I used to show each other our signatures; the more unique it is, the better. We would even drew a template to put signatures in our notebook and pass it around so that everyone can sign it, just because. I always thought of signatures as something really interesting, because I feel like it defines people based on how they do it. The style, characters and strokes of someone’s signature will always be different from someone else’s, even if the difference is really small.
ReplyDeleteEven though it’s something that I find very interesting since I was little, now I just feel like signatures are not that effective. It’s something that I realised just a few months back. Signatures are very easy to copy, especially if the person’s signature is very simple; such as a signature that looks like a caricature of a smiling whale. And to put our signatures on important documents and payment receipts might not be the best thing to do today. I was paying for my meal a while back and I paid with my credit card. Given a choice of using my PIN number or sign on the bill, I chose to sign since it’s way easier and I can get it over with quick, my signature is quite simple. Then my friend told me about her opinion and how signatures are just very risky to put on payment receipts and it’s better to just use our PIN. Now, I think with how advanced technology has become, there are so many substitutes for signatures that are somewhat safer. And I think we should use it more than just doing our signatures.
ReplyDeleteA signature is a pattern that everyone has. Usually signatures are used for the administrative process, but besides that the signatures hold meaning about the nature of an individual. When I was in high school I was trained to read the nature of a person through the signatures they wrote and until now I still understand how to do that. There are so many patterns that are owned by everyone and there are so many unique traits that I examine. In my opinion, signatures are not just a line pattern but many philosophical values are behind a signature. Therefore, when I was in high school, I was very interested in learning about how to read someone's nature through signatures. At that time I learned from a psychologist who worked at my school. If you are interested, I can make a little observation about your nature through the signature that you made.
ReplyDeleteTalking about signature, I have a funny story when I was little. When I was at primary school, my school was cooperating with a bank, the students can open their own account, and every week, every student can save their money into the account. At the time, I think I was only six or seven, and every time, a student wants to save some money into the account, we need to sign this bank book to complete the transaction. At the time, I do not have a signature yet, and nobody ever told me or teach me how to write a signature, so every week, I just randomly sign the bank book with different made ups signature every week. In this modern day, I think it is very important to have a signature. Now, I already have my own signature, it is not the coolest or the best signature in the world.
ReplyDeleteSignature, in some way, can be defined as a person's name written in a distinctive way as a form of identification in authorizing a check or document or concluding a letter. Signature is a unique thing that can only be made by the person who owns it. if anyone could copy it, it wouldn’t be the same as the original. There is also a short version of signature. In Indonesia it is called “paraf”. It is usually used to sign a short document or mostly for absents. Because a “paraf” is short, is more likely that a person can copy other’s “paraf”. That is why many students can ask a friend to sign their attendance form. Signature nowadays, can be used to legalize many important documents, mostly regarding our data. Signature is used in our identity card, driver’s license, passport, and many others. Some parties verify us by the similarity of our signature and the one that we just made. This is why signature is an important aspect.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was little, I saw that my parents and my teacher were making signature on various kinds of paper. I saw my parents signed my agenda and my report. I also saw my teacher signing my report and school assignments. I asked to my parents, and they told me that everybody should have a personal signature. At that moment, I immediately wanted to make a signature. It took me years to finally have my own personal signature. Sometimes, the style of my signature was inspired other’s style. When I come up with a signature, my mother told me to remember it and don’t change it, especially if it was recorded in an official document. My first official document was my bank account book and it needed my personal signature. From that, my mother told me to don’t change it. So, from that moment, I always used the same signature. I consider my signature quite difficult, and that is quite good so you can assure that no one can copy it.
ReplyDeleteI remember that I was so enthusiast when I could finally make my own signature; I’ve always wanted to have my own signature. When I was seven years old I saw signature as something that is related to adults and it just seems cool to me. Back then, I didn’t know that signature is a crucial thing to have. But as time goes, I realised that signature is not written just because it looks cool. Signature is actually written in many occasions. For example, when I got my first ID card and driving license, when opening bank account, and also for many important documents and letters. The other thing that I observed is that, every different person has different signature; and they are all unique. There are people who make a very simple signature that can even be easily copied by others; but there are also people who make their signature so good looking and hard to copy. What is true about signature though is that it resembles someone’s personality.
ReplyDeleteBack then, my father said a signature can define the personality of a person. I strongly agree that signatures are important, as it can give us a particular unique mark of our own. Signature is always used in many aspects in our everyday life, for example ; class attendance, signing reports, signing papers, documents, and many other else. Every person always have their own signature, as it is what makes them unique, and every signature of a person, as my father said, can define a person’s personality. Back when i was a child, i always want a signature of my own, but i ended up copying my father’s signature, and it was horrible. I remember changing my signature twice, because i didn’t quite like the first one. Most of people’s signature contain their name in it, but some of the people don’t put their names on their signature. I myself use my first name, Fikri, as my signature, because my last name, Adikusumo, was too long to write and it’s confusing to read it.
ReplyDeleteI would like to give a new perspective about signature in the comment. You likely may not know that electronic signatures are legally recognized as equivalent to their pen-and-paper predecessors. These days, it’s hard to imagine how businesses managed to get things done before the Internet. Many people not only use email and Internet research in their day-to-day business operations, but check in from a smartphone or other mobile device when they’re away from the office as well. The speed of communication and depth and breadth of information available via online sources is difficult to match elsewhere. Electronic signatures integrate seamlessly into the way many organizations do business. After using computers to draft, edit, and send versions of a contract back and forth, there’s no need to suddenly dust off the fax machine or send someone across town with a pile of papers to sign. Businesses can complete a contract agreement in a fast, secure format online. There’s every reason to expect that businesses will continue to seek more opportunities and negotiate relationships online thus signature may not be significant in the future.
ReplyDeleteComing from someone that has an extremely awful signature, I envy every single one of you that has those beautiful, classy, neat signatures. Just like everyone else, when I was young, specifically at the age of 13, I’ve always wanted my own signature. I went through the typical teenager’s phase in my life, scribbling signatures and jotting them down in any scrap paper that I don’t need. By the age of roughly 15, knowing the fact that you can only have one signature for the rest of your life and how strictly identical you have to write/draw them down, I’ve decided to stick with one signature idea and spent another one year trying to master it and getting them to look as similar as possible. This leaves me at the age of 17, the age when one becomes an adult with responsibilities and documents vital for the next stages of their life. It turns out that one year of practicing on doing my signature was a complete failure or at least not enough because all my documents such as my licenses, passport, identity cards, saving account books all have different looking signatures. Fast-forward to today, my signature still looks awful and I still can’t get them to look equally the same.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, signature is merely a formality that societies expect individuals to have in order to confirm affairs. Going as far as into thinking that there is meaning behind every signature or how signatures can tell so much about the personalities as well as the backgrounds of the writer is what I would call as digging too deep into something that doesn’t have much meaning to begin with. Sure, a signature is something that should be unique and hard for other people to replicate in order to avoid forgery. However, that doesn’t mean people can’t just draw random funny additional curves to their signatures in order to achieve dissimilarity. Hey, even many graphology experts should’ve realised at this point that they may have been lied about by some people who have purposefully decorated their signatures in order to invoke false impressions on those graphology experts that they have some intriguing personalities not known to others.
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ReplyDeleteLectori Salutem,
In my opinion signatures are quite important. We all have our own signature; this makes it possible to distinguish ourselves from others. This makes it possible for us to sign legal documents and to be sure that we were the one giving the approval. With the modern technology we don’t have to be scared that our signature will be copied and misused by others, since nowadays they are able to see how made the signature by comparing the pressure points in it.
Personally I like it when a signature can be explained, for example my signature is an “L” that turns into a “B” followed by “OON”, which makes my last name Boon. After that, I just add the letters D and C to complete my initials (L.D.C. Boon). I hope that one day, when I’m the Prime Minister of The Kingdom of The Netherlands, I can hand out my signature to a lot of people.
I found it hard to decide on my own signature. When I was in middle school, a lot of my friends were excited or enthusiastic to create their own signatures, while I was always confused on how to create mine, since I’m not really creative. My signature was always changing before I used the last random one for my identity, and I had to use it then. When we were asked to sign on papers such as important documents, I saw a variety of unique signatures, and eventually, I found out that signatures can determine our personality. It is called graphology studies, and it is actually interesting for me. Each person has their own signature which differs from anybody else, and its distinctive features can identify our own personality traits. My teacher once read my personality by graphology, and he said that my signature was bold, which means that he/she is tough or strong.
ReplyDeleteA signature, can be defined as your name, written in your own characteristic way, often at the end of a document to indicate that you wrote the document or that you agree with what it says. It is a unique form of your name, that only you can make it. Moreover, your signature mustn’t be copied by other people. There is also another short form of signature. Here, we call it “paraf”. A signature is usually used in legal and formal documents such as identity, passport, driver’s license, while a “paraf” is usually used in a unformal document. Usually a “paraf” is used in an absent. It is important that you have your own signature, especially when you have reached your legal age. You will use that signature as long as you live, and it will be put on legal documents. Sometimes, you are also required to put your signature in ATM cards, and many more. In conclusion, a signature can be categorized as important in human’s daily activities.
ReplyDeleteIn general, signature means a symbol of our identity and the mark that you use to represent yourself to the world. I still remember, back then when I was very excited to make my own signature. I asked my sister to show me her signature, then i tried to make it for myself. I don't know why but back then, my friends and I were so obesssed in making it, we tried to make it as complicated as possible. As I grew up older, I realized the importance of signature. People used it as important identification such as passport, back accounts, driving licenses and so on. However, some people say that signature also reveal a lot more about you than you may realize. It means it can reveal the details of our personality by examining out own signature. But, I don't believe that. The one who know our personality is ourselves.
ReplyDeleteSignatures for me have been a really confusing thing for years. I first saw a signature back when I was a just a little boy, at that time I thought that signature was really weird and I didn’t know what was it for and then I finally what was it for when I learnt it at school. What happens next I started to question where does one signature came from because I thought how come someone just come up with a signature right?. Until now I still don’t get it where does a signature come from, but talking about signatures, I think signatures are very very important, why? Because of the question that I ask before, because signature came from nowhere that makes every signature very unique and hard to copy so it makes the perfect tool to legalize a document or something like that so I guess signatures won’t be replaced in the near future.
ReplyDeleteI think the concept of signature is fairly odd. I recall feeling so excited about making my own signature when I was six years old sitting in first grade of primary school. I made a weird flower shape and called it my signature. Everybody in this earth must be able to rewrite that flower in a blink of an eye. With this illustration, I would disagree to making signature as authorization for payments and other crucial papers. But, to be fair, I think signature is more authentic than personal identification number (PIN). People do not always keep their PIN to themselves, they tend to tell families or important ones. Meanwhile, signature is a style that not everybody would be able to recreate. Because of this, I think signature makes a fast, easy, and acceptable way of evidence for low-risk papers such as absence. In a nutshell, I prefer avoiding the usage of signature for higher risk authorization and only use it for lower risk authorization.
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