Phonetic Friday
If we have to talk like Typographers, let’s at least do it right.
Lucida. Kabel. Univers. Anything ‘Neue.’ We have all had to say these things out loud (you must have, you’re reading a blog post about typographic pronunciation for crying out loud), and I have personally stumbled through my share of typeface names, type designer names, and foundry names.
Sometimes I’m talking to a coworker or friend, in which case it’s generally acceptable to scrunch up my face and pronounce the thing three different ways while waving my poor colleague past the wreckage like a construction worker with an orange flag.
Other times my conversational company looks respectfully at me, because I “know about fonts,” and I am faced with a miniature aneurism as I choose between looking confident and being honest. Either way I answer, I get a reaction from people – from my boss, my mom, or several nice folks I just met – that’s halfway between their feeling embarrassed for me and their wishing they hadn’t just wasted ten seconds of their life.
No more of this!
I want to phonetically absorb inscrutable typographic vernacular as easily as pulling the string on my Max Kerning action figure, and there’s nothing like Twitter for inscrutable and easy.
Phonetic Friday. Use it verbatim or with the single hash tag: #phoneticfriday