March 17, 2007
Today as I was practicing typing on my brand new keyboard and trying to get the feel of the new-fangled thing, I found myself automatically typing the phrase, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”
I did it without thinking because I was taught to do that by rote by my high school typing teacher, the late Miss Jenny Ellen Cardinell. She was actually married, but back then nearly all female teachers were addressed as “Miss”.
It was the 1960’s and that is when I learned to type.
I will bet diamonds and donuts that if you learned to type in the 60’s or before, you will write that phrase every time you try out a new piece of computer equipment or anytime you practice typing.
Psychologists tell us that there is a difference between “believing” something and “knowing” something.
Typing is one of those things we “know” how to do. Just like riding a bike.
Once you know how, you never forget. You may get rusty, but you always know how.
“Belief”, on the other hand, is defined by Encarta World English Dictionary (1999 Microsoft) as a “statement, principle, or doctrine that a person or group accepts as true”, as opinion or faith.
We do not believe we can type; we know we can.
The same source defines “to know” as having information firmly in the mind or committed to memory or having a thorough understanding of something.
Such as, typing.
There is a certain satisfaction in typing as well. One can escape into the routine of it all and thoroughly enjoy its practice without thinking.
I suppose typing is a lot like knitting or painting a fence or mopping a floor.
One does not need to think because just the act of “doing” something we know by heart can be the ticket to a mental vacation. And, we all need that.
In high school typing class you will no doubt remember, we practiced typing pages and pages of exercises, worked on punctuation and numbers, learned to type “X’s” in the shape of a Christmas tree, and mastered the typing method QWERTY.
You may not remember the name, but you know it by heart.
QWERTY is the universal nomenclature for a typewriter keyboard and comes from the first six letters in the top alphabet row, the one just below the numbers: QWERTY.
C.L. Sholes is the inventor who first built a model keyboard in his machine shop in Milwaukee in the 1860’s. The configuration of keys was introduced on the “Type Writer” in 1872. It was a clumsy device to say the least.
That original keyboard was designed to improve speed by determining frequency of letter pairing. In 1978, Remington Company, an arms manufacturer, made the only major modification to QWERTY and that was adding a shift key. Few changes have been made since to keyboards.
They got it right from the outset.
Amazing.
And so did our typing teachers who quite rightly taught us much about life when we thought all we were learning was how to type.
In actuality, we learned much more than typing.
We learned to be accurate, work quickly, correct our mistakes at once, never do sloppy or shoddy work, and commit to heart the first words we ever learned to type: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”
It occurred to me how relevant that simple typing exercise is today. Perhaps in this crazy world of ours if we practiced what we learned in typing classes so many years ago, the world might be better for it.
So, I have resolved to type that phrase more often and to remember its advice in the days ahead.
The easy part is we already “know” it by heart.
