When I was in school, in the US in the 1950s, we first learned "printing" and then "writing." "Printing" meant the letters were not joined up (but we didn't use the term "joined up"). Even now, you hear people say "Please print your name" when they want to emphasize legibility. They aren't talking about using a printing press; they only mean "don't use cursive."

I suppose it was called "printing" because the letters resemble those you see in printed books; they aren't "joined up." Printing includes both upper case and lower case—but we didn't call them "upper case" and "lower case." I learned those terms much later. I think we called them "capital letters" and "small letters."

After we mastered "printing," we went on to "writing." That meant joined-up. I think we were introduced to the ball-point pen at about the same time, and we were given smoother, whiter paper to write on, unlike the pencils and "manila" paper we had used for "printing." "Manila" paper was coarser and brownish.

I think the word "cursive" came into vogue later. Nowadays kids and teachers in the US always use "cursive" to mean what we used to call "writing" and what Brits apparently call "joined-up writing."

I've been scanning through the fonts that came installed with my copy of Microsoft Word 2007 (or is it Windows Vista that supplied my fonts?), and the font that most closely resembles the way I was taught to "print" is called Century Gothic.

Here's what Century Gothic looks like (if you have it installed):

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

I find it odd that there are two very different ways to make an "a" and two very different ways to make a "g." Compare Century Gothic to, say, Times Roman (to name a font that almost everybody has). That means we were being taught to "print" those two letters in a way that was very different from the way we typically saw them printed in books. I wonder how that situation came about?

By the way, I never used an inkwell in school, but I often sat at desks that had a round hole in the upper right corner. That hole, I was told, was designed to hold an inkwell. The older desks had dark stains around the hole,