Body-text fonts, pt. 56: Guardian Egyptian
Guardian readers will be familiar with the house font.
Matthew Butterick:
This is hardly the best type specimen. The quote marks are “straight” rather than “curly,” and the dash in the second line appears to be a mere hyphen.
But I exhibit it because it’s an outstanding passage from one of my all-time favorite reviews: a pan of the great Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. It gets at what’s so elegant and so disconcerting – so craftily, poignantly removed – about Ishiguro’s prose.
(I’ve been reading Ishiguro’s books in order. Their formality is endlessly fascinating.)
The Guardian passage explains certain tendencies in my own writing.
I, too, am a kind of foreigner.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Another insight along similar lines, due to Nancy Mitford (Don’t Tell Alfred):
Suppose that, over time, that country’s influence is inflated. Eventually, the blood will be siphoned out even from the Mother Country’s speech.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
See, also, David Lodge’s chapter, in The Art of Fiction, on Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day:
Matthew Butterick:
It’s counterintuitive, but a well-designed font can have a lot of subtle variation between letters and still look consistent on the page. The converse of this principle is that a font with too much consistency can be numbing to read. Cambria is an example of this problem. It works well on screen, but on the printed page, it’s a skull-clutcher. Guardian Egyptian … [is] similar to Cambria but [avoids] monotony.An example of Guardian Egyptian:
This is hardly the best type specimen. The quote marks are “straight” rather than “curly,” and the dash in the second line appears to be a mere hyphen.
But I exhibit it because it’s an outstanding passage from one of my all-time favorite reviews: a pan of the great Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. It gets at what’s so elegant and so disconcerting – so craftily, poignantly removed – about Ishiguro’s prose.
(I’ve been reading Ishiguro’s books in order. Their formality is endlessly fascinating.)
The Guardian passage explains certain tendencies in my own writing.
I, too, am a kind of foreigner.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Another insight along similar lines, due to Nancy Mitford (Don’t Tell Alfred):
You must remember, with Americans, that they are fighting to express themselves in a language they’ve never properly learnt. They need the dissertation; the kind of shorthand that we talk would be useless to them.Recall, also, C. S. Lewis’s remark in Studies in Words:
It was better to have the older English distinction between “I haven’t got indigestion” (I am not suffering from it at the moment) and “I don’t have indigestion” (I am not a dyspeptic) than to level both, as Americans have taught most Englishmen to do, under “I don’t have.”If you introduce many non-natives into an English-speaking country, then – naturally enough – phrasal verbs will get phased out: got will be dropped from I haven’t got.
Suppose that, over time, that country’s influence is inflated. Eventually, the blood will be siphoned out even from the Mother Country’s speech.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
See, also, David Lodge’s chapter, in The Art of Fiction, on Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day:
Stevens [the narrator] speaks, or writes, in a fussily precise, stiffly formal style – butlerspeak, in a word. Viewed objectively, the style has no literary merit whatsoever. It is completely lacking in wit, sensuousness and originality. Its effectiveness as a medium for this novel resides precisely in our growing perception of its inadequacy for what it describes.
