A subjective account on the font that is destroying our creativity.
Every school everywhere is thoroughly enwreathed in the Times New Roman font. Teachers profess its propriety to their pupils’ pliable minds, and do no less than require it for anything from an essay to a castle blueprint.
But does Times New Roman truly ameliorate our learning? Is there a darker, and more subtle, mechanism behind the stuffy, haughty fontling?
It has been noted that Times New Roman muffles the emotional disposition of letters. And if it muffles the emotional disposition of letters, it surely muffles the emotional disposition of the broad emotional dispositions of the typical student’s imaginative mind.
Arial, a font besmirched for its “boringness”, for its “casualness”, for its “unserifed ugliness” is perhaps not quite as ceremonious as the revered Times New Roman font. In spite of this, Arial maintains the spunk and personality and plumpness of letters and does not make them all look solemnly alike.
Observe the following:
The latter, evoking thinness, malnourishment, and glum uniformity turns “wistful”, from wistful, and sensitive and poignant and profound to an unvarying and frigid-hearted word. And “puddle” from amiable, from mellow, from snug, to crestfallen and greedy and sad.
The wicked Stanley Morrison, with his betwattled henchman Victor the Lardent, fabricated TNR (as to avoid repeating its shuddersome title time and time again) to please The Times (a newspaper, much like The B-Line, though much more British and much more bureaucratic) in the year 1931. Wikipedia, rather fickle in honesty though steadfast in honor, calls to mind crispness, baroque paintings, and typesetting machines, though neglects to mention any of the nastier aspects (of TNR, that is).
The printing historian Mike Parker, who is even more a controversial figure that Master Stanley or Victor “Snaggletoothed Snollygoster of Symmetrical Snippetry” Lardent (it remains unclear whether that was actually his nickname, or something some unreliable middleman invented out of beaming barbarity), found meaning in life through meaning in word. In 1994, as tempestuous year as it already was, Mr. Parker published to the world the claim that TNR was, much to our earnest society’s extreme discomfort (for who enjoys their life’s beliefs being questioned by some scheming little hermit?), created not after the design of Master Morrison but rather, after the design of William Starling Burgess, a splendid name for a wretched man (that is, as wretched as a starling can become, murmuration abounding or not).
But oho! What of the spindly Mr. Parker? And what of his farly-fetched ideas? Among those overly drawn out typeface connoisseurs one is destined to meet at least once in a sorry lifetime, Mr. Morrison has become a particularly scandalous figure, attested to solely by his Canadian flunkey, Gerald Giampa the Groomp. But gnarled has Times New Roman’s history become, and gnarled has our’s become as well.
When students are writing an essay, a poem, an unilluminated manuscript, they cannot fully embrace the words that come from their fingertips if shrouded in the churlish Times New Roman font. And if the words are not as friendly, as emotional, as personable, as interesting, the student is certainly going to exert little to none of the effort required in extracting words that trickle awe, and wonder, and creaminess and tranquility into the yearning for word-doting soul (this is beginning to sound like the preface of a Disney movie).
Only the most devoted fribbler, you will interject sometime soon, cares for the wellbeing of the teetering substructure of the imagination, and frets on the destructive tendencies of Romans, neologisms, and the unnervingly stout crags of tintinnabulating time. But this is where you, the educated, scholarly individual you are, wrong, and I, an arbitrary website page who didn’t exist even a short time ago, right.
Students express their thoughts using TNR, which, if you’ve been paying anything close to the attention we lack, doesn’t express anything particularly finely. And as the cycle (that of students expressing themselves by means of TNR while TNR lies ill-equipped to be used as a form of expression of thought) swings hither and thither in a thoroughly dragging manner, the thoughts themselves won’t want to be expressed in such a manner as TNR, and the interesting thoughts will become nullibiquitous, scattered, and buried away.
Students will shackle their vocabularies to naught but the most battered, small-print finance journals, finance journals notorious for their unflattering looks, unimaginative content, and word choice that excites no one but grum, squiziting professionals.
And as the world scratches its chin, wondering where in Ragnvald Knaphövde’s voluminous hair the imagination of mankind has been tucked away, Times New Roman will, as always, dodge the blame and whistle merrily as we, and our minds, are swept up by the gusts of our dilapidated state of being.
