“Come, come, and sit you down; you shall not budge.
You go not till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you.”
–Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4
There comes a moment in every man’s life when new evidence forces him to reconsider everything he once uncritically believed. For me, that moment came when I learned that Marco Rubio and I both like the same font–Times New Roman.
According to a New York Times article by Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz, titled “At State Dept., a Typeface Falls Victim in the War Against Woke,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently called for the reversal of the use of Calibri in State Department documents.
Why? Rubio’s main argument seems to be that serifed fonts are more dignified and traditional, claiming that they will “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work,” that they are “generally perceived to connote tradition, formality and ceremony,” that Calibri “clashes” with the department’s letterhead, and that they “[echo] President Trump’s call for classical style in federal architecture,” as seen in the origins of serif typefaces in Roman antiquity.
Notice the rhetoric here: Calibri is “degrading,” it’s “immoral,” and it “clashes.’
And I get it; I like Times New Roman, too. It’s in all the books I read, it’s the font of this site, everything I’ve ever had published uses it, and it’s what teach my students.
Now, I am no more inclined to believe that anyone in the current administration really cares about “decorum and professionalism” than I am to believe that Donald Trump cares about the tenets of classical Federal architecture while he is destroying the symmetry of the White House and planning an (increasingly) lopsided addition that more closely aligns–in aesthetics and ideology–with the Imperialism of Vienna’s Schonbrunn Palace than it does with Mount Vernon or Monticello. So what’s really going on here?
“But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.”
–Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2
Just as this wielding of civic tropes serves to paper over a very different agenda, hanging on to the forms of outdated imperialist dogma was not Rubio’s only–nor main–reason for bashing Calibri. According to the article, “The change, he allowed, ‘was not among the [Biden] department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of D.E.I.A.,’ the acronym for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.”
I don’t know when that final “A” got added to the list of initials. (Wouldn’t it already be included in the “E”?) But when did accessibility become “immoral” and “radical” to an administration that sells itself as being populist? And is it why, to use another example, the White House decided to stop using ASL interpreters during press briefings, claiming that they “severely intrude on the President’s prerogative to control the image he presents to the public”?
“The point envenomed too! Then, venom, to thy work.”
–Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2
The phrase comes from one of the most frequent comments I found myself using when responding to student writing. All of my prompts have included the following guidelines:
Times New Roman 12 point font, double-spaced, with 1″ margins.
In addition, I have directed students to use “standard” sized paragraphs–neither too long nor too short–a design that works out to be around 2.5 paragraphs per page, based on a paper size of 8/5 x 11. My reasoning, as I would say in class, is that “a college paper is a visual object,” and that “appearance is rhetorical.” Step #12 in my 13-step process Powerpoint is “Make it Look Good,” which appears between “Check Your Citations” and “Turn It In!”
What does a college paper “look like”? Why does it look that way? Who decides/decided? What, ultimately, is the telos of the different rhetorical forms?
Not necessarily. The use of different serifs in a document can be very effective, as seen in many White Papers and presentations. In fact, I require such formatting in my Technical Writing course.
The change, he allowed, “was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of D.E.I.A.,” the acronym for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.
That final “A” is a new one on me. And when did accessibility suddenly become taboo for a party that markets itself as populist?
“Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence,” Mr. Rubio said.
There are many reasons why the use of a particular font can be ill-advised, but this is the first time I’ve seen one described as being “degrading.” It has a certain Triumph of the Will quality to it, not out of line with this administration’s fascination with strength and power and its abhorrence of anything having to do with softness or infirmity.
Echoing President Trump’s call for classical style in federal architecture, Mr. Rubio’s order cited the origins of serif typefaces in Roman antiquity.
piece of punctuation. Besides, the White House web site makes liberal use of a sans-serif font, including for the president’s own name.
I rebelled against Calibri, not because it’s “immoral” or “degrading,” but because it was Word’s default font, and I can be very defensive when it comes to those things.
the wrong font 
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