The Politics of Script

When Marco Rubio issued an order last week for the State Department to revert to the use of Times New Roman as their default typeface on official documents, he suggested that the adoption of Calibri had been motivated by a “woke” administration serving “diversity” agendas that were costly and inefficient. Even if, as cited in one press source, the use of Calibri had added $145,000 to the budget, that is so trivial it would hardly register in the Department’s finances. But, as we know, symbolic gestures are everything and have no relation to reasonable logic.

Calibri, a sans serif font designed by Lucas de Groot around 2002, had become the default typeface for the Microsoft Office suite, including Word, around 2007. As the default, it was the easiest, most labor-efficient choice for anyone creating a document. Using Times requires selecting from a menu every time a new file is opened, an action that could take as much as two seconds to complete. Even Elon Musk might wonder if this counts as inefficiency, though of course, over time, those seconds add up. Still, if labor saving was the motivation for the reversion, Rubio was dead wrong. Anyway, the information is out of date since Calibri has been replaced by Aptos, another sans serif face, as the default for Office. Since it might, also, be perceived as readable on the screen and page, it will likely meet the same dismal fate. As to suggesting that Calibri was adopted because it accommodated readers with visual impairment or cognitive challenges , that raises other issues.

Bishop John Wilkins, page of “Real Character” shown in interlinear relation with text, 1668.

Debates about legibility, defined as the property by which one letter is able to be distinguished from another, and readability, the relative ease of making sense of written text, have raged for centuries. So have proposals for alternatives to conventional scripts. We could go back to the Renaissance philosophers, such as Bishop John Wilkins, who in 1668, inspired by a misunderstanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics, attempted to create a writing system that could communicate meaning directly to the eye. He called it a “Real Character and a Philosophical Language” and worked it out in complete detail. In 1680, George Dalgarno published Didascalocopus, which presented a graphic language used as a basis of hand signals in an early version of sign language for the deaf. Spelling reformers keen on modifying orthography to conform more perfectly to sound values proliferated a range of experiments in the 19^th century, including Alexander Melville Bell’s Visible Speech (1867). (He was the father of Alexander Graham, whose important contributions to communication technology had an incalculable impact on modern life. Given this liberal parentage, maybe all phones should be turned off.)

George Dalgarno, Didascalocophus, 1680

Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech. 1867

Type designers have their own insights about legibility. The influential Zuzana Licko, co-founder in the 1980s with her partner Rudy Vanderlans of the pioneering digital foundry, Emigré, asserted that “we read best what we know best.”[1] Jeffrey Keedy, another graphic star, agrees, as do many others. In other words, familiarity might be what contributes to legibility/readability, not formal qualities. Arguments against sans serif include the observation that the vertical emphasis of its strokes makes the eye run down the page while serif fonts “catch” the eye. In any case, we do not read letters, but words, and the efficiency and clarity of Times New Roman is achieved in part by its x-height (the proportion of a lower-case letter defined by the letter “x”). In geek terms, that means the ascenders and descenders (upper stroke of the “h” and tail of the “p” and “q”) are less important that the middle part of the body of the letter. Good to know. (I once tried to design a typeface and after some considerable effort realized it would have to be named “CroMagnon,” so I abandoned the project and merely increased my respect for the pros.)

Times New Roman was designed by the highly respected (and largely self-taught scholar-designer) Stanley Morison who worked with a team at Monotype Corporation to produce a typeface for the London Times to replace what he felt was an out-of-date style. Launched in 1931, it has proved to be robust and versatile. The reading public is largely ignorant of the humanistic lineage of Times, which can be traced to the work of 15^th century Italian designers, among others, who were in turn copying from handwritten scripts that were distinct from the blackletter and gothic hands whose forms came from brush and broad pens. Humanistic handwriting was open, elegant, and round. These and other the lower-case letters of our alphabet, including those of Times, are further related to an even earlier model, the Carolingian miniscule whose development had a distinct political agenda. Attributed to the British monk, Alcuin, the miniscule was created in the late 8^th century to serve the needs of Charlemagne in consolidating power across his empire. This was a management decision, meant to foster uniformity, and enacted as part of other reforms in the abbeys and schools. For his administration to function effectively, Charlemagne (or Alcuin and their advisors) determined that using a single script would facilitate communication. Given the range of local hands and varieties of letterforms in medieval Europe, this was an astute decision. The politics of script were not just formal, but functional and symbolic. The Carolingian miniscule became the official hand and its forms are still with us in Times and other typefaces with a humanistic origin. (These letterforms have a much longer history, of course, that leads back through the Etruscans to Phoenician versions of Semitic scripts in the Levant. But that much history veers perilously close to science and might even challenge the Biblical dating of Creation. We can’t have that.)

Trajan Column inscription, 106-113 CE.

But if the consolidation of empire bears within it one kind of implication for the use of a script and then typeface, then the development of Roman majuscules (which, combined with the lower-case letters of Carolingian make our common letterforms) is aligned to another, earlier but related Empire—of Rome. These majuscules were developed with the same degree of rational design and geometric intelligence as other engineering feats of the Romans. The inscription on the Trajan column is immediately legible to contemporary readers and the letters have, like Carolingian ones, remained largely unchanged in two millennia of use.[2] These letterforms have been subject to all kinds of attempts at rationalization and reform, as well as been modelled in extravagantly decorative and ornate instantiations that stretch legibility to extremes. In the 1920s, the Bauhaus-affiliated designer Herbert Bayer aligned himself with the Kleinschreibung (“little writing”) movement that believed a single set of letters in one size was sufficient for linguistic expression. We do not “speak” in upper and lower case, Bayer suggested, so why preserve these graphic differences? He designed “unicase” to demonstrate his principles. The single-case design did not catch on. Conventions are hard to shake and the German language uses majuscules prolifically for nouns. With the rise of National Socialism, Bauhaus designs were banished along with other “decadent” modern artworks. La plus ça change… The various blackletter fonts, especially Fraktur, were promoted to prominence with the assertion that they promoted an authentic “German” identity. A similar move had been made earlier, after Napoleon defeated various German states in the early 19^th century when the deliberate adoption of black-letter was meant to consolidate German national identity even before the existence of a unified nation state.

The politics of script resides in the cultural significance associated with the typeface rather than in its formal properties, though these become merged in public perception. Consider the inscriptions on civic buildings and monuments, styles of official and informal signage, and the many properties that make a document appear to be authoritative. These are all examples of cultural semiotics at work in which the graphical features of language play a role.

One bit of irony in Rubio’s ill-informed decision is that Stanely Morison was also the author of Politics and Script (1972), a book that examined the changes in letterforms that arose on account of tensions within the Church (beginning with the Eastern/Western schism) and with the State. The development of letterforms was used to signal allegiances and identities in a manner Morison clearly saw as a deliberate part of power struggles. Morison, who had converted to Catholicism, was a conscientious objector in the First World War, a decision that was severely criticized by many of his peers. What would Rubio make of this aspect of Morison’s profile and of his erudite scholarly pursuits? Times may have been invented for a daily newspaper, but its pedigree links it to expertise and sophisticated capacities of discernment and scholarly knowledge.

As for the ethics of Rubio’s decision, they are reprehensibly cringe-worthy. Motivated by a desire to make texts harder to read for persons with cognitive or visual impairment? Why not advocate an administrative policy suggesting that people steal walkers from the elderly, rob blind people of their canes, trample hearing aids in a public demonstration of anti-diversity activity?

Dante will have his work cut out for him in designing new circles of Hell with punishments appropriate to the crimes of this repulsive administration. And those magnificent Roman majuscules, enduring long after the Fall of that Empire? What a sad fate they have suffered in the current climate where they are used in the all-night temper tantrum social media postings of a two-year-old would-be tyrant.

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[1] Uros Nedeljkovic, Kata Jovancic, Nace Pusnik, “You read best what yu read most: an eye tracking study,” Journal of Eye Movement Research, 2020, Nov. 5;13 ():10.16910/jemr.13.2.9 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7963459/

[2] The Trajan Inscription, http://codex99.com/typography/21.html