Obsolete term: touch typing

[Peter Richardson]

When I was on the admissions committee here I noticed that lots of
students were taking a HS class called "keyboarding," so I guess that's
what's become of "touch typing"--unless "keyboarding" is now applied only
to the quasi-musical instrument.

I'd guess that increased use of the web by even little kids has spawned a
whole generation of touch typists. A parallel is found in those of
lightning thumb, the proficient cell phone dialers; there have been some
articles recently in the NYT about them, including, I think, a contest in
Japan to see who could enter a string of something like 100 numbers the
fastest--or who could enter the most numbers in a given time.  This would
be the modern equivalent of the old wpm (words per minute) test that
secretaries had to pass.

Incidentally, "touch typing" is known in German as "10 Finger blind,"
although in normal touch typing the left thumb is never used. Just why
it's not "9 Finger blind" has always escaped me; but then most things have
escaped me over the years...

Peter R.

On Tue, 3 Dec 2002 AAllan at AOL.COM wrote:

> Talking with a smart student tonight, I mentioned "touch typing" and she