In his sad sod hut he sat on his hen.
I had lots of plans for the weekend — as many weekend plans as anybody can have during a pandemic, at least. I had intended to clean the bathtub, remove hard water spots from the dish rack, and catch up on sleep ahead of the time change. It was not to be. Instead, I decided to relearn how to type.
I am not bad at typing. I type at about 60 words per minute on a QWERTY keyboard, which, while not extraordinary, is enough that I manage to send out this newsletter weekly without too much trouble. Predisposed as I am to fixing problems that do not exist, though, a friend mentioning something called the “Dvorak keyboard” sent me down a slippery slope.
There are many types of keyboards. Most Americans use the QWERTY keyboard, which is so named because of the order of the keys at the top left and was designed to stop typewriters from jamming, which does not make it very good for typing. We have simply settled for mediocrity over decades. Central Europeans use QWERTZ. The French use AZERTY. Dvorak has an audience that is defined not by geography, but rather by geekiness.
Dvorak (which is pronounced more like it looks and less like the composer) is named not for any order of the keys, but rather after its inventor, August Dvorak, who set out in the early twentieth century to replace the inefficiency of the QWERTY keyboard with something better. August Dvorak made it his life’s mission to convert the world to his new and better keyboard layout.
The Dvorak keyboard is better. Its keys are arranged with the vowels in the home row on one side to minimize hand movement and alternate typing between hands (look at your keyboard and think about typing “minimum.” That’s what Dvorak was up against). It reduces awkward hand movements and repetitive motion strain and does — allegedly, at least — speed up typing.
By midnight on Saturday, I had pried all of the keys off of my keyboard and started rearranging them in their new pattern, which revealed, among other things, that the Dvorak keyboard has its name because the first row — “<>PY — does not have the catchy pronounceability of something like AZERTY.
The great trouble in making the switch comes when you realize that you need to relearn typing altogether, which is a considerable feat.
I learned to type properly in sixth grade, when I was made to take a “keyboarding” class. The term “keyboarding” turns a boring noun into a verb that feels very much like “snowboarding” or “kiteboarding.” The publisher of the book and software for the class, ever mindful of the passions of 2008’s middle schoolers and keen to spice things up, did include a photograph on the cover of a child surfing through the heavens on a giant keyboard.
The reality of the keyboarding class was somewhat different. For three hours out of each week, a hoard of middle schoolers sat toiling away in a computer lab, each one praying they would make it to 30 words per minute by the end of the semester and be liberated. Each day was variations on a theme of asdf ghkl;.
Perhaps the warning sign that I would be renouncing my QWERTY education more than a decade later was the prevalence of the semicolon in the keyboarding class. I do not understand the semicolon, and I have taken very great pains to avoid it for years. QWERTY gives it a place of honor on the home row. Dvorak replaces the semicolon with the S, which has given my right pinky a new life of purpose.
With any keyboard layout, the world of early keyboarding lessons is one constrained by whatever reality with the few letters of the home row. An alphabet of twenty-six letters was enough for Shakespeare, but even he would have run into trouble with just ten. The people who write online keyboarding lessons for Dvorak have just enough imagination to scrape together “in his sad sod hut he sat on his hen” and “dan did not see the dot on his tie as he hid his tin hat,” neither of which tell a particularly compelling story about the human experience.
At the end of ten minutes of typing these sentences, the website I have enlisted to teach me will say “Congratulations! You typed 8 words per minute with 70% accuracy!” This is not something for which somebody at my age with a software job would typically be congratulated, but I appreciate the sentiment. It takes a lot of positive reinforcement to make the big switch, which is perhaps why we are not all typing on Dvorak keyboards to begin with.
August Dvorak died in 1975 and is often quoted as saying shortly before his death, “I’m tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race — they simply don’t want to change!” In this sense, I feel a special kinship with August Dvorak. I am trying my best, but I am still typing this on a QWERTY.
Distractions
Things I have been reading and watching this week.
“Why Are Elections So Hard to Design Well?” from the Wireframe Podcast.
This podcast came to me by way of a college professor of mine (and loyal Ian McKnight Newsletter subscriber!) in response to an earlier newsletter on government design. It is fascinating. Government design matters everywhere, but particularly in elections. The extreme example, of course, is the ill-fated Florida “butterfly ballot” that sent the nation spiraling into chaos in 2000, but the issue is more widespread than that. The fact of the matter is that elections are the ultimate design challenge. They must be designed for all eligible voters. That’s a whole lot of people with varying abilities and prior experience voting. The challenge of providing a good, reliable system for all of them is huge, and it is a fascinating (and still unresolved) case study in civic design.
This is What Democracy Looked Like by Alicia Yin Cheng.
On the subject of election design, this is the latest addition to my coffee table book collection, which arrived as a Christmas gift from a friend (and another loyal Newsletter subscriber!) who knows me too well. This is the perfect visual companion to the Wireframe podcast. It is a simple visual history of printed American ballots, and it drives home the point that our system has always been messy — that’s democracy!