Tyranny of Intentions pt. 2: Hisses and Kisses

Sometimes, my cursive h's look remarkably like my cursive k's, both of which are not all that distinct from my cursive l's. This meant, in my childhood, that I spent several hours of "free time" writing out cursive k's and h's to the satisfaction of my 3rd and 4th grade teachers. This was not the origin of my ongoing distrust of the motives of elementary school teachers, though it was a significant contributing factor.

So I was writing today another insipid bit of verse, which contained the phrase "were [ ]isses," where the double bracket marks the aforementioned indeterminate l/h/k. Of course, I still know what I meant at the time of writing, but it occurred to me on a second read that 1) I often take for granted that one besides myself can determine whether I have written an h or k (or l) and that 2) the context (a snake nipping at one's heel), to my mind, does not favor one reading over another, be it "hisses" or "kisses." Certainly, "lisses" is out of the question; it isn't even a word (I don't think). But even the question of what word is secondary to an orthographic problem.

Both print and its bastard child markup would deal very inappropriately with my graphic "slip of the tongue." Neither typesets nor unicode contain a character that sort of looks like a k but also looks somewhat like an h or an l. This problem could be rectified, I suppose, by enlisting the services of any of a number of companies that transform samples of one's handwriting into a truetype font. They would only need to replicate my own similar characters for this graphic problem to be represented, right? Wrong, as, you see, only sometimes are my h's like my k's. Sometimes, they are quite clearly distinct. This difficulty could be dealt with by using a macro in any of the various text editors to use one character (the indistinct one) at times and another (more distinct) at other times. The irony, though, is that this seems to be a ridiculous amount of effort to go through just to represent digitally (or in print) what otherwise is very simply and obviously manifest in the handwritten document.

This gets at something that has been milling in my noodle for quite some time: it seems the intent of print (and markup), if it can be said to have intentions at all, is to regularize orthography in a way that handwriting does not and to restrict the degree by which one can actually subvert the goals of standardized print. Regularities in print exist to facilitate reading (i.e. make reading facile), to move interpretation from a primarily graphic to a primarily semantic level. This shift is largely an illusion, as anyone with an OCR scanner can show, because text still has to be read on a graphic level first. All standardized print (and markup) has done is invisibilize the visual interpretation of text and the fundamental role it plays in "higher" orders of semantic interpretation. It permits one to disregard the textuality of the document at hand and render it merely an information carrying medium. But in this case the medium is the message, part of it at least, in not only what it does say but also in what it leaves up in the air.