(You are going to have to wait for Christmas)
On official forms, when one is asked to write one's name, the request is usually made to write entirely in plain capital letters. This is because cursive handwriting can be hard to read.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) use the term block letters.
Sixteen years ago, a sweet man, eager for his overseas bride-to-be to make it to the United States filled up one such form.
Until he came across the instructions-- Complete this form in block letters.
The young man stopped.
He scratched his head and hunkered down to complete the task at hand.
"It is going to be a long night," he said to himself.
The painstaking art of forming each and every letter with right angles at every corner was not a job to take lightly.
Wiping the sweat off his brow he struggled, "these D's look like O's when they are blocked!"
He wondered, "How are the R's different from A's in this dratted block form?"
Yet he labored through the night, not wanting a hitch of any sort.
The bride-to-be received the carbon copy of the application from the INS.
The woman stopped.
She scratched her head, amazed that the INS approved the visa petition in a form filled with
undecipherable letters masquerading as perfect squares.
She laughed her head off.
After mercilessly teasing her groom about his wrist cramp, she explained that the term block letters meant printing unjoined letters.
Sixteen years later Ms. Never-Let-Him-Forget-The-Block-letters gets hers.
She was submitting an essay for consideration for an inspirational women's project.
She was told she had 834 words against the necessary 1500 words.
Smug-Bride wondered, "how the heck do they count those words?"
But she pressed on, adding a paragraph here and there...painstakingly counting each and every word, finger to the screen.
The painful process of counting words was not lost on Smug-Bride's proof reader who said:
"you are not counting those words by hand are you?"
This is the story of how I discovered the word count function on my computer just yesterday.