I'm pretty sure that's not true in the world of typography. Cursive there afaik mostly means that it has a ton of ligatures (i.e. a ton of "sorts.")

Fonts that are decorative, when I worked in prepress, were simply called "decorative." It just meant "not for body text" i.e. hard or annoying to read. I assume in the past it meant "don't buy a ton of these, and none in small sizes" because you weren't ever going to be putting a bunch on a page.

> I'm pretty sure that's not true in the world of typography.

You're correct, "cursive" is a handwriting term, not a typographic one. The parent commenter almost certainly meant "script". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_typeface