A helluva vitica

I saw the documentary, Helvitica, a few years ago, about the fanaticism of font designers.  It was incredible to me how much theory and how many standards they thought up clear out of their own minds and there was some math as well.  Well done nerds, I admire them their passion and their creativity, not so much their circus of fonts.  They all look pretty much alike to me.  Except for the exotics  (Verdana) That is as exotic as Blogspot allows among its seven possible fonts and I could not  applaud more loudly or more longly.

It's fine for the fontists to have a swell time shaving a little off the top loop of that f, giving the ends of an s a little bling, but force it not on us Joe Sixpacks who just want to read and write and don't want to go down some wormhole into a land where this font is for this and this font is for that like the forks I imagine Old Dog sets out before his plate of grilled cheese, one fork for butter, another for mayo, and maybe chopsticks for soy sauce.  Avast all this crapola.

I have never found myself reading a fine bit of literature admiring the wit and the pathos, but feeling like something is subtly wrong, like maybe it is printed in the wrong font.  Nor have I ever been reading a newspaper, and thought my what fine reading, why I just fly from page to page like the time I put those new Firestone tires on that old Buick, why it must be because the font  is trebuchet.

Funny thing I went to google to figure out  how to spell the font and what I came across was that fancy catapult.  No, I thought, I want the font, but further research reveals that they are both spelled the same, and doubtless there is some connection and likely a cracking good story behind that, something a fontist could expand upon to a delighted crowd over brandy and cigars, and again I am applauding longly and loudly, but reading the paper in the morning I just don't care.

So some mad fontist discovered a font that would cut down the length of the completed works of Shakespeare by a dozen pages.  How exciting (there is no sarcasm font, a pity).  Why had we discovered that earlier we would now have cities on the moon, and jet packs.  Surely it is mishandling our fonts that is responsible that at this late age in the development of civilization we are not able to fly around with the grace of a fairy and the blast of a 747.