The word “legacy,” I fear, is losing its meaning. Well, words really don’t having “meanings” as much as they have “usages,” but still you get my point. When I was young (before the Internet had been invented) a legacy was a time-honored contribution. Something that had, perhaps, been a family heirloom or a significant school of thought. Legacy today simply means something outdated. It’s a polite word for “old.” I’m reminded of this constantly in our computer age. I’ve never been a fan of lingo. In fact, I seldom use slang. (I think it was being raised with Holy Writ that said, “Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay.”) It’s not that I don’t hear slang frequently. I can even replicate it when necessary. It’s just my legacy.
The other day I attended a meeting about fonts. I never stop to think much about fonts. I’ve designed a few (on paper only, that most archaic of ancient mediums) and I enjoy the wonder of knowing that no matter how embellished or plain, an A is still an A, just as surely as a yea is a yea. When discussing fonts, however, “legacy fonts” kept coming up. Perhaps alone in the room I could recall the days before computers. The days when a font was a set of clearly defined green dots that you could trace with your eye as they appeared on the cathode-ray tube. The legacy fonts under discussion were much more recent than that. It was simply a way of saying fonts we no longer use. Old fonts. Outdated fonts.
Unicode, to be sure, is a thing of wonder. As a scholar who struggled to get Hebrew vowel points to line up correctly on the pages of his dissertation, I knew well the benefits of having a system to organize any sign we use in writing. Even as recently as my last book, published last year, I was still struggling to find transliteration symbols for some words in Ugaritic. I’m sure they must exist in Unicode, although I don’t know if Unicode Ugaritic is yet a reality. It’s barely a reality in biblical studies any more. So maybe I’m just feeling like the memory of ancient things has been devalued. We go after the new, the fresh, the simply coded. Meanwhile, I still prefer to write with pen on paper. I’m old-fashioned in that way. Those who are too kindly disposed might even say, although I would blush at the compliment, that I’m a legacy.
A legacy font?
Photo credit: Bilsenbatten, Wikimedia Commons
