Everyone's handwriting is getting worse, thanks to keyboards, the decline of letter-writing and everything in between.
"Some people's strokes are sharp and jagged, some write with slanted or collapsing forms, some cram all the characters together into a dense block, and some link strokes together until their writing looks like a tangled ball of yarn," said Ji Mengyu, a middle-school Chinese language teacher. "As we like to say, 'Beautiful handwriting all looks the same — but bad handwriting comes in endless varieties.'"
Ji is an expert. She is the administrator of a social media club that has become one of China's latest internet sensations — the "Worst Handwriting in History Group".
From an online joke, started by a couple of professionals and teachers such as Ji, comparing their childish scrawls for their mutual amusement, the site has grown to 200,000 members who entertain each other with memorable examples of spidery gibberish and apparently insane attempts to cram as many characters into as tiny space as possible.
It has also grown in purpose, from a support club aimed at removing the stigma of bad handwriting to a forum for solving handwriting puzzles.
Most remarkably, it has become known as a place where the squiggles of elderly people, often in their dying moments, can be posted for deciphering by their loved ones.
In one case, some scribbles on a piece of paper left by a dying patient were posted with a request for help: even to his grandson, himself a calligraphy teacher, they seemed meaningless. Site users eventually declared they meant "why isn't someone coming to pick me up" — the grandson speculated it meant his own father, the dying man's son, who had in fact himself passed away three years before.
In another memorable case a patient's scrawl from intensive care was deciphered to mean "I've got something stuck in my throat" — which turned out to be true.
A collection by an online magazine devoted to social affairs included such moving but originally illegible final words as "take care of yourselves — in the next life, we will still be a family", and "my mind is topsy-turvy — please take care of your mother". One squiggle turned out to be a rudimentary will.