Handwriting conventions, of all things, are becoming a key issue in county government nowadays.

Salt Lake County Mayor Nancy Workman, under investigation for her hiring of a temporary employee, staunchly maintains that she did nothing worthy of criminal sanction but does acknowledge that, procedurally, "we may not have dotted all our i's or crossed all our t's."

"It's not a question of right or wrong," County Council Chairman Steve Harmsen said. "It's a question of dotting the i's and crossing the t's."

If you're like most people, while writing in longhand you usually finish any given word before going back and completing things by putting in umlauts, accents, tildes, diereses, the horizontal lines through the vertical lines of the t's and the spots of ink on top of the vertical lines of the i's.

Those spots of ink are known as tittles or, simply, dots.

Several observers have lamented that, with handwriting generally deteriorating nowadays (one sign of the computer-caused decline of Western civilization), people — already rather casual about the exact placement of the marks modifying or completing their words — are now even more inclined to put them in places only peripherally connected to their corresponding letter, or not at all.

"Someone in a rush might neglect to complete the task," write Steven Walker and R.B. Stevenson in a Web site explaining the origin of cliches (note, by the way, the acute accent over the e).

To avoid just such a situation, Christine Ammer in "Have a Nice Day — No Problem! A Dictionary of Cliches," writes that in centuries past, schoolteachers admonished their pupils to "dot the i's and cross the t's," particularly since without those distinguishing marks the letters had a tendency to be confused with one another.

Jenny Wilson, the Democrat challenger to Harmsen this election year, illustrated the problem in a press conference she convened Tuesday in which she said attention to detail is a sign of good government and that lack of such attention is "sending the message that mediocrity is just fine at the county."

Wilson's object lesson, conducted on a chart prepared for the purpose, consisted of dotting an i and crossing a t: two forlorn, indistinguishable vertical lines until the candidate triumphantly gave them identity.

A few hundred years ago Wilson's object lesson would have been lost on her audience. It wasn't until the end of the 14th century that i's were first dotted at all, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

It wasn't until the 19th century that the phrase "dot your i's and cross your t's" began to be used beyond literal writing, expanding to a more general sense as an indication of precision or meticulousness.