Anne, regarding your joke, Susan Staub gave a very entertaining paper on
Master FJ at the Gascoigne Seminar last year which brought out the
sexual punning on the "secretary" as the keeper of the lady's "secrets",
so I wonder if the joke you're thinking of may also have a bawdy kind of
meaning too? It would be good to see the wording, but perhaps it plays
on that kind of misogynistic idea of a woman not being able to "keep" a
"secret", sexually or linguistically? Just a thought.
Gillian Austen
Anne Prescott wrote:
> Sorry, Roger. All I remember is a joke almost suggesting the opposite
> (that doesn't mean you aren't right, only that they were inconsistent),
> so I'd love to hear any answers you get to this. I also wish I could
> remember where I read the joke--it's in a Renaissance (English)
> jestbook and answers the question about why there are no women
> secretaries (ho ho, when you consider more recent times) and the answer
> depends on a wording that I can't quite remember but is something to
> the effect that "who has ever seen that a woman could write
> secretary"--but in the original the language punned on "write"
> secretary and "be a" secretary. Someday I'll find that joke. Anyway,
> that suggested that women preferred Italic because the poor dears
> aren't up to secretary hand. Since I think a lot of women did write
> secretary hand I find this confusing. True, I can read Italic but need
> the likes of you to read secretary.
> Many years ago either Joe Loewenstein in his essay about a
> printer's aide who absconded with the Italic font moulds (molds?), or
> someone even deeper in my past (in RenQ, maybe, or Studies in the
> Renaissance) had a nifty bit on a young man in Italy who wrote his dad
> in Italic because he knew it would bug him to see the younger
> generation using this fancy new script as well as reading these fancy
> new Greek imports from the East. Maybe it was fashionable because it
> was recently foreign and so way totally unlike the Gothic times of
> one's great-grandparents?
> I will find that joke. Anne.
>
> On Jan 12, 2010, at 11:28 AM, Roger Kuin wrote:
>
>> (apologies for cross-posting)
>>
>> Dear Sidspens,
>>
>> I remember hearing a conference paper a number of years ago in LA
>> that claimed that in 16C England the italic hand was considered more
>> difficult to write than secretary hand, and that in part for that
>> reason it had prestige. Does anyone have a source or a corroboration
>> for this idea?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Roger Kuin
>
>
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