Just My Type

Typeface. For me, it's one of those nit-picky things. Years ago -- egad, it must have been during the Carter administration -- I was trained as a legal proofreader. We corrected copy that had been set by Linotype. Sometimes the font was very very small, otherwise known as "reading the fine print." Often, in addition to catching spelling and grammar errors, we had to send the page back to the printers to be re-set if the lead type-slug was out of line (or sometimes even upside down). Ah, the old-fashioned days before computer-generated printing. I spent two squinting years relentlessly red-penciling wayward type.

So, my urge to straighten out lines of type is strong -- beyond my control, actually.

And now, every day as I spend hours typing at my Yahoo screen, I see this:

Do you see it? Where it says Copyright/IP Policy? It's just an optical illusion, of course. The type is all in a level line. But it nags at me from the bottom of my screen all day, looking to me as if it's a wavy line of type, begging to get smoothed into place.

Reminds me of one of my favorite métro stations.