"Gife Begins in the Garden," proclaims the sign posted in a place of pride in the well-tended flowerbed of a woman whose paper I deliver. In testament to my stellar observational skills, it somehow took me until yesterday to notice this, whereupon I stood there and stared at it for a good minute and a half while the busily whirring gears of my brain ground to a halt and made weird ka-chunk noises in an attempt to process this.
I couldn't help thinking of my mum's story of her first encounter with a nutria (a very large rodent of South American origins) in Portland; there she sat in her car, overcome with shocked indignation that someone had up and invented an animal and not told her! That's about how I felt about this. When had this mysterious word come into being? Who could be held responsible? Most importantly, what on earth did it MEAN?! The garden's owner holds some pretty extreme political and religious beliefs on the opposite end of the spectrum from mine. Perhaps, I thought, it might be some form of jargon, not necessarily political or religious but gardening-related.
Either way, her car's place in the driveway was empty, and besides, its not exactly good form to knock on someone's door just to ask what a sign in their flowerbed means. At last I resigned myself to mystery, picked up my newspaper bag, and moved on.
This proved a wise decision, since about a block and a half up the road the little lightbulb in my head finally went on. The sign didn't say "gife!" It said "life!" It just said "life" with the most bizarrely g-like l I have ever seen! And this, dear readers, ranks pretty high on the Dubious Honour Roll. I've seen some seriously confused letters in my time, both in handwriting and, sadly, typistry.
Here's the thing. If it's a tattoo or a metal band's logo or something, bizarre fonts are okay, I guess - I'm not a fan of them, personally, but hey, if that's your thing and you're going more for a graphic look than actual legibility, knock yourself out! But if it's something you actually want people to read without the assistance of Sherlock Holmes, please make sure it's readily decipherable.
If need be, get at least one person to check it for you; just because a close friend with similar tastes to your own can read it doesn't mean that your grandfather, the soccer mom down the street, or the businessman who waves to you as he drives by can do so. For a lot of young people, this might seem kind of irrelevant. I know that in high school I certainly thought so. Man, who cares about old people reading my stuff?
Then I stopped and thought about why I write - not why I write blog posts or why I write stories, or, really, even why I write, so much as why people in general write. This is, of course, so that they can communicate an idea or ideas, which means that, unless it is in fact a slogan so distinctive that it speaks for itself, it needs to be legible.
Furthermore, it needs to be appropriate to the situation. Think about it like clothes: it's illegal to be naked, so you get up and get dressed. But you don't dress in just any old thing, hopefully - you dress in something warm, if it's cold (unless you're one of those miniskirt-in-a-blizzard people, in which case I have no idea what to say,) and you don't wear sweatpants and a hoodie to an interview any more than you wear a three-piece suit to play video games and eat Spaghetti-O's.
Sure, it's a funny thought, but that's just the thing. It's funny because it's completely bizarre and inappropriate, just like, to take an extreme example, writing a doctoral thesis in Papyrus. Papyrus is legible. Papyrus is also going to get you laughed right out of your hard-earned degree.
On a sign in your yard, it's pretty irrelevant. On anything else...please, be sensible with your fonts, or better yet, pay me to revise them!
Um. I mean...
...nope, that's entirely what I mean.
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