December 10, 2018/pat
In a local news in Thailand, a celebrated graphologist received wide mockery in social media after endorsing a lottery stand.
Here’s the story (Thai version here):
A lottery merchant told a story that someone had bought lotteries at his stand that ended up winning 90 million baht. The patron, a regular, left the lotteries with the merchant. But the merchant was an honest man and brought the winning to the rightful winner.
Business was booming immediately for him. On one of the early good days, all of a sudden the famous graphologist came to pay a visit, to commend the merchant for his honesty, give a calligraph that spells “rich,” and pronounce the location of the lottery stand was auspicious. All was good.
Except…the whole thing was bogus. A PR stunt. And merely a week had passed by before he was found out as a sham.
And now, the social media table turned on the famous graphologist. He’s been hiding from limelight.
This story rings close to home for me, because, just days before this news broke, and my girlfriend, along with three other lady friends, had contacted this very graphologist to design their signatures for them (for a price). He’d asked them for their names, dates of birth, et cetera et cetera. I’ve got the pictures of the signatures he invented for them (though I’m not allowed to show them here) – they all looked uncannily similar to one another to me. Nevertheless, the ladies have all been practicing signing their new signatures to perfection.
A lot of people believe that signature, and handwriting, reveal a lot about the owner. The characters and the state of mind, at the very least. The future, but that’s a stretch. And this is found not only in the old and the classics either, but also in the new. I was amazed to see this one ‘analysis’ of the signatures of famous tech people. Jobs. Gates. Bezos. Dell. I wonder what it would say about Travis Kalanick. :p
In the old and the classics, graphology is of course featured prominently in detective stories. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a true believer of the art (or..science?) himself. He describes Sherlock Holmes with unnatural ability to interpret handwriting. Holmes supposedly can tell the gender and the character of the writer. He can compare two samples, and not only tell if they are by different persons, and whether they are related! (For prominent cases featuring this mad skill of his, check out The Reigate Squires and The Norwood Builder.)
All wonders Holmes could perform with mere handwriting are too good to be true, except one. Signature and handwriting verification is performed all the time, even in modern days, as a forensic measure. True, it’s not an infallible measure, as both signature and handwriting can be forged well with a skillful con artist. In this sense, Holmes was lucky, and not because the skills of the con artists supposedly improved over time.
I’ve had to forge my parents’ signatures a few times, friends’ handwritings at least once, for a prank. I did not do a good job. It was hard, but not impossible. What’s impossible is to forge well and with speed too. And that is where I think the modern-day real-world counterparts of Holmes are having a tough time. Back in the old days, pens were fountain and feathered quill; slow strokes would have blotched ink on the paper. Today, with all the ball-point pens, forgers can take time to mimic similarity in the outcome only.
Coming back to what your signature reveals about you, one thing that I think might be worthwhile to explore is to think back to when you invented your signature. Why do you sign it the way you do now? Any story behind that? To get started, here’s my story.
I was obsessed with money when I was younger. Back in high school, someone told me a Chinese superstition that in order to have a lot of money, my signature had better begin with a pouch. A money pouch. Open up, so that it can keep money. For both first name and last name.
Not an ounce of artistic creativity in me, I found the requirements difficult to try to fit into my full-name signature. So I went up to this buddy of mine, a band drummer who later became an architect. (Some traits show since young age.) When he heard my needs, he said “easy peasy,” and just invented one for me right there. It looked amazingly good and simple (enough for me to replicate). So I took it and practiced and still sign it till this day.
Later when I was going abroad, I had to sign in English. I’d shaken off that Chinese superstition by then, but not the obsession with money. So I invented my own English signature…with a big $ in it!
What’s your story?
Also published on Medium.
