The 500-year-long battle to make written irony easier to understand

By EmmaZahn on Sat, 10/26/2013 - 2:44pm |

...long ago Tom Driberg [a Labour MP] proposed that typographers should design a face that would slope in the opposite direction from italics, and be called ‘ironics’.” With jokes set in this typeface, Levin said, no one would have any excuse for failing to see them.

Fittingly, Driberg’s life was a mess of ironies: he was a married, gay High Anglican who lunched with occultists; a leftist politician who revelled in frivolous society gossip; a patriot who spied for both MI5 and the KGB. It seems entirely apt for him to have proposed the creation of a typeface to invest text with a double meaning.

URL:

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/rain-your-wedding-day