musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Virtues we write in water on a dissolving typeface


Sometimes I feel really old; there’s no other way to put it. I’m not just referring to my lack of fashionable clothes -I suppose they’re obvious- but apart from buying a new smart phone when there’s an appealing deal on offer, or having to replace my old MacBook Air even when there’s not, I suppose I’m pretty predictable. I go to the plaza’s Food Court to have a bagel and coffee at least once a week (I know the employees and the prices seem reasonable), I write essays or whatever in the mornings, and go for hikes in the woods most afternoons. My breakfasts, my lunches, and even my evening dinners with their predictable tomato-banana-raisin-peanut-olive-Romaine lettuce and occasional left-over white rice salads, are embarrassingly ho-hum no matter the (also) predictable main course.

I think it’s easier to slip into habits like that when you live alone, though, eh? I mean stuff just happens, and barring guests (do people still do guests?), all too easy to accept the banality it entails. In fact, changing things would be like becoming lost on a trail where you’re pretty sure you know every tree, every twist and turn, and every dog that accompanies its owner (both of which remain repetitively nameless despite their cheerful greetings).

Still, as long as nobody draws attention to these little peccadillos, I hope they will continue to pass unnoticed as I wander through the seasons. Sometimes, however, they are not so easily dismissed; sometimes, greater attention to detail might cast a more favourable light on my endeavours. Usually one needs to break the egg before making the omelette.

Take for example my need to write every day, no matter whatever else beckons; a morning just isn’t complete without opening my Mac and seeing what comes out of my fingers for the day. I claim no particular skill, just a commitment to practice, as it were. On good days, I can watch quite passively as my fingers develop a theme, or change their minds mid-essay as I shake my head at their audacity. Still, I’m so absorbed in the evolution of words on the screen, it’s hard to be too critical of their direction, let alone their clothes.

It makes me realize why it’s only a hobby; I suppose I start out with a mission: to transcribe my thoughts, but my thoughts are often so stochastic, I can’t rely on them for more than a few sentences; and anyway, who actually employs the fingers? To whom do they owe their allegiance? I’m just happy they play along with me for a while…

The other day though, as I watched them at work, a random thought somehow surfaced for a moment in the turmoil in my head: why is there a list of other typefaces on my Word screen? Oh, sure sometimes I’ll use Times New Roman instead of my usual Calibri, or very occasionally Courier New, but unless it was my fingers that chose one of them, I have no idea why Calibri 12 (my current typeface) seems to win out. I mean why are there so many choices anyway? Of course with a Dupuytren’s contracture curling the little finger of my left hand, I’ve been deprived of the usual allotment of finger choices as well, but I mean I try to make allowances for little distractions like that.

 Have I, as a recent article suggests,[i] been missing something, however? Have I deprived, or even lost, some readership bored with the same old look; the same old makeup disguising a worn, wrinkled page? Is what I do each morning just lipstick on a pig? Should I freshen things up a little?

As the author, Andrea Piovesan, a university lecturer in Psychology, points out: ‘When we read, we are not just processing the words. We are also taking in the typeface, which can shape how we interpret a message and even what we think of the person who wrote it… we process words more quickly when the typeface matches the meaning we expect.’ For example, ‘people reliably link curved shapes with positivity and angular ones with threat or negativity…  Sharp, angular forms in the environment can indicate danger, so our visual system has evolved to detect and prioritise them quickly. This bias appears to spill over into our perception of typefaces too, making angular fonts feel harsher or more alarming, while curved ones seem warmer and more pleasant.’ Oh yes, spoiler alert -I almost forgot- ever heard of ideophones, or the Bouba Kiki Effect? Well, in case you missed it, ever anticipatory I wrote about this a few months ago…[ii]

At any rate, it’s obvious I shouldn’t always blindly depend on my fingers, I guess. Sometimes I want to be serious; believable; trustworthy, so my eyes should switch my typeface to camouflage the words my fingers insist on choosing: Times New Roman, for example (originally designed in the 1930s for the British newspaper the Times. Over time, its connection with journalism has become ingrained, making Times New Roman synonymous with professionalism and formality.) Or even ‘monospaced fonts like Courier New, in which every character takes up the same amount of space, were seen as better suited to technical materials and computer code. And then, of course, the typeface Piovesan’s article used: Baskerville. It ‘tends to be seen as professional, trustworthy and high-quality.’

Clearly, after all these years of pecking away at a keyboard, I am still not au fait with this kind of esoteria. My fingers obviously don’t give a toss, and the homunculus who sits behind my eyes directing traffic doesn’t care either. I’m not sure who’s to blame, but as an octogenarian, I suppose it doesn’t really matter, eh?

As those of you who repetitively stumble innocently into my essays, hoping against hope that the current one will show an improvement over the last, will no doubt remember: I still find myself influenced by the enlightened words of Oscar Wilde. He observed that ‘With Age comes Wisdom; but sometimes Age comes alone’… or without a novel typeface for which this website is unprepared, forcing my fingers to resort to a Grawlix: @#&$%!

I don’t want to blame the website though: heaven knows how much extra they’d charge to satisfy an occasional whim. Best let sleeping fingers lie, eh?

[i] https://theconversation.com/its-not-you-some-typefaces-feel-different-270192

[ii] https://musingsonretirementblog.com/2025/02/16/speak-the-speech-i-pray-you/↗

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