When I was nineteen years old, my boyfriend at the time told
me that he had what he thought was a really smart strategy for signing his name
to things.
“I just make everything after the M a squiggle,” he said. “That
way no one can read it. If anyone asks, I can just say it’s not my signature.”
He had a very serious look on his face as he explained this.
“So you have plausible deniability?” I said, using two words
he didn’t know.
He looked confused but went with it. “Yeah!” he said.
I sat there, reevaluating my life choices. Was he really
that good in bed? “Um, I don’t think it works that way,” I finally said.
“Why not?” he wanted to know.
“Why even sign in the first place?” I countered. This seemed
to stump him.
I don’t remember why the topic came up, or even what, if
any, specific document he’d seemed so reluctant to sign. I remember being
baffled by the man’s logic, because I intuited that a signature doesn’t
necessarily need to be legible in order to bear legal evidentiary power. In the
U.S., at least, a wide
variety of marks can count as signatory, including rubber stamps, digital
signatures, a personalized symbol or even an X.
When I was young, I was conscientious about my signature in
a way that I wasn’t about my love life. I wrote my signature carefully, forming
each letter in cursive as I had been taught to in grade school penmanship
class. Whenever I signed my name to anything I did so while looking sweaty and
shaky, because I was worried that my signature wouldn’t look right and the
cashier at the Circle K would think I was impersonating myself.
As I got older, my signature became sloppier and sloppier –
the degeneration of my signature occurs in direct correlation to the decline of my ability
to give a f&ck. You know how they say, “Correlation does not equal
causation”? Well, in this case, it does.
The first casualty was the capital A in my last name. At some point I stopped making a large, round,
cursive capital A and just started
putting in a printed A. Then I
ditched the c in my last name, making
it smaller and moving it up, and then finally turning it into an apostrophe.
Sometime later, I turned the cursive Ms
into printed Ms and then into big
squiggly lines. Meanwhile, the Es on
the end of my name gradually flattened more and more, until they became a flat
line. Finally, a few months ago, I was signing my name to a credit card receipt
and I decided, “F&ck it, life’s too short, but my name isn't short enough," and just lopped the Es off altogether. Now my signature
reads, Marjorie M’At.
I think the Rs
will be the next to go.
Well ... I'm with you to a degree.
ReplyDeleteMy signature is illegible. I don't know when exactly this happened and it really doesn't matter.
All I know is in the everyday of Life? I can tell the difference between my signature and someone else's who has tried to duplicate it. And in the grand scheme of things that's all that really counts.
That ... and the fact I have better things to worry about.
Sure, as long as you can tell it's your signature, that's all that matters.
DeleteI feel like my signature has gone way downhill since I started signing for things with my finger.
ReplyDeleteOMG YES! It's ridiculously bad when I have to sign with my finger.
Delete