Letters: Tweeting, then and now

Re “Tweeting by mail,” Opinion, June 23

As a man of 85, I have seen the transition from postcards to Twitter, and I can say without hesitation that both serve a valuable purpose in communicating in simple language.

There is a fundamental aesthetic quality in Japanese haiku: that it is internally sufficient, independent of context and bears consideration as a complete work. Some postcards have gained these qualities through time and use.

Let us hope that concise tweets of intelligence and poetic structure may do the same.

Anthony Lawrence

Woodland Hills

Monica Cure’s Op-Ed article on the initial skepticism over postcards nicely laid out concerns over privacy and the proliferation of poor writing.

In assembling a birthday album for my 88-year-old mother of her nightmare life growing up in Berlin during World War II, I was able to include wartime Christmas postcards provided by Hitler to the thousands of teenage boys who were drafted out of their classrooms and shipped out to foxholes.

The cards didn’t allow space for much to be written, so it was interesting to see how the young soldiers outsmarted the censors by deliberately misspelling words to form hidden messages to their families at home. Evidently, the censors never caught on and thought the boys were just lousy spellers.

Craig Carr

West Hills

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