We’ve come to expect bad typography on TV, but Colbert isn’t just another show, it’s a sublime critique of politics and culture, and it deserves better typography.

An epithet or an epigram could make for a suitable epitaph, but there isn’t room on a tombstone for an epigraph, is there?

Primer
by David Galef
Oxford, Mississippi

The epigram’s a pithy saying, Full of paradox and wit.
The epithet’s a brief description. A clever name that scores a hit.
The epigraph’s a type of preface, Like the lead-in to a writ.
The epitaph is seen on tombstones, Related to who’s under it.
All four are commonly confused, But in each usage, three don’t fit.

We have an English cognate in ‘virgule,’ which means ‘slash’ (and for typographers it means the keyboard slash, as opposed to the solidus, or fraction-bar slash). Virgule comes to us from the Latin virgula, a diminutive for virga, or ‘rod.’ The illa suffix in Spanish is also a diminutive, and thus virgulilla is doubly diminutive.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Tilde also carries the effect of diminution. The Spanish verb tildar means ‘to add tildes where needed,’ but it also means ‘to diminish or denigrate.’

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Al Jazeera’s distinctive logo consists of a teardrop-shaped glyph with the words Al Jazeera below in Arabic or English. What non-Arabic speakers might not realize is that the glyph itself also spells out “the Island,” al Jazeera, in a modified Arabic script. It was quickly designed by a Qatari man who entered it in a design contest, where it was chosen by the Emir of Qatar.

By the way, the al in Al Jazeera is a definite article, which is the source of so many “al” words in Spanish (e.g., alcalde, albóndiga, almohada). Some of these Iberian Arabic words are now common in English and other European languages (almirante (admiral), albacora (albacore), alfalfa, alcohól, albaricoque (apricot), alcachofa (artichoke) algoritmo (algorithm).

Mac OSX users can simply drop the TrueType fonts into Library/Fonts. I have to manage a large collection of fonts so I use FontExplorer (a reasonably priced, high-performance utility from Linotype). Windows TrueType files are invariable identified through a mysterious naming convention that probably makes sense to an engineer somewhere, so you’ll appreciate the Mac OSX finder’s ability to display the font when you click on the file.

Now don’t run out and buy collections of awful fonts with titles like “Font Explosion,” or “1,000 Awesome Fonts.” I kept this old collection because Bitstream fonts are professional-caliber fonts. Better to have a small selection of good fonts than a large collection of bad ones.

Others posit the credible idea that the question mark evolved from an inverted semicolon. This may sound fanciful, but look at the evolution. And, after all, the eroteme (question mark) in Greek is a semicolon.

Simon Heffer’s dispassionately sarcastic dispatches to the Daily Telegraph’s writing staff are a combination of droll finger-wagging and acid admonition, but his prescriptive battle against “unfortunate Americanisms” is surely a lost cause:

… There is no need to write “parking lot” when you can write “car park.” Barristers in this country are not members of law firms; they work from chambers. Witnesses do not “take the stand” on this side of the Atlantic. In this country we have railway stations, not train stations. Travelling has two l’s in it. Our Armed Forces are not “the military.”

For Mr. Heffer, Americanisms represent a threat to English just as tabloidism represents a threat to professional journalism:

“policymaker” is a nasty Americanism. If we must say it, we hyphenate it.

Mr. Heffer recently departed from his position, and I can’t help but be saddened by the thought of Americanisms running riot at the Daily Telegraph in his absence.

In the American typographic and printing trades, the exclamation point was referred to as a “bang” or a “screamer.” One still occasionally hears these terms, as in “Postscript files always start with percent-bang-PS” (%!PS).

Traditional etymologies of the exclamation mark, recounted by the brilliant, amateur classicists, Alexander & Nicholas Humez in their book ABC et Cetera go like this:

“…the exclamation point … is derived either from an abbreviation of Latin interiectiō (interjection) or from the Latin interjection Iō! (‘Hey!’).” In their most recent book, On the Dot, the Brothers Humez explain that the exclamation mark was known in English as “note or mark of admiration (a straight-forward translation of Iacopo’s term punctus admirativus),” and the term “exclamation point” was adopted in the 17th century.

If you accept the traditional etymologies, the morphology of the exclamation point, as with the question mark, appears to boil down to the convenience of abbreviation. Medieval scribes stacked the i above the o, the o became a point, and thus evolved this indispensable, energetic punctuation mark.

Note: Avoid overuse.
Note: the term eleventy, or eleventies is an ironic twist on the habit of commenting with an over-use of exclamation points — typing ones and inadvertently lettting up on the shift key (e.g., !!!1!!!!111!!!). “Eleventy” or “Eleventy-one” refers to the ones that slip in between exclamation points.

The etymology of uncial goes something like, “from Latin uncialis, from uncia (inch),” but Alexander & Nicholas Humez, in their brilliant book ABC ET CETERA The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet, offer other etymologies. Uncial also could have been St. Jerome’s reference to either illuminated letters, or to “hooked” letters, depending upon how uncialibus was misspelled by the Saintly Dalmatian.

Either way, I agree with St. Jerome. Use uncials sparingly. Legibility is more important than ornamentation.

Ice any bold font, or flock it with snow.

When we needed a cartoonish, frozen-styled font, we were stymied by the lack of selection. We were shooting for that, “ice-machine” look — the “typefaces that are frosted or chilled or iced,” in the words of Gene Gable. We created some lumpy, congealed snow clumps and icicles that we could place on a layer above any letter, punctuation or shape. This gave us control over the look of the snow and the ability to choose any font from our collection.

Our free snow and ice shapes are available here as a pdf that you can parse with any vector design program. Use them as they are, or modify them as you see fit. And don’t forget your mittens.