What is lost in transposition to typeface?

Are words less romantic once digitized? Are emotions not as genuinely felt when transposed to standardized typeface? There is certainly something personal in someone’s penmanship—one can see the hand get tired, excited, and forgetful in wobbly, imperfect words.

I have not found that the typeface, per se, drains one’s personality in writing. As long as I can draw the connection between how someone wrote something to how he or she would have said it, I can grasp the personal energy of his or her words. Rather, the problem lies in so-called online lingo.

Interestingly, though typing is considered faster and less tiresome than writing by hand, the use of abbreviations has become increasingly popular with the development of type. This is largely due to all the various forms of online chatting. The result is that abbreviation has become a widespread language of its own. This language, in its cutup and informal character, reflects our desire to compress language and to get a message across as quickly as possible.

In his new book “Yours Ever, People and Their Letters,” Thomas Mallon uses stories of people’s correspondences (such as Flaubert’s and Freud’s) to describe the joy and intimacy of letter writing. Each letter is entrancingly layered, full of memory and personality. To Mallon, letter writing is a contrast to what he believes “e-mail is now doing”—a “chatty, hurry-up violence.”

Perhaps this is so. It could be that now, because e-mail has made it easier to write, we write more often, and for both important and futile reasons. But when one writes a letter, one must dedicate time, patience, and thought.

From moving many places throughout my childhood, I know how much energy writing letters demands. Determined to keep in touch with my friends, I meditated through several letters. It was a process: I had to find the perfect letter paper that had enough illustrations, but that still allowed room for a few drawings and a photograph. I had to reread the letter a few times, to make sure I didn’t forget anything. I felt like a “real person,” sending and receiving my own physical mail.

Now, however, because technology has made the actual writing process much easier, receiving an e-mail is not quite as thrilling. It has even become, at times, a mundane part of daily life. In her New York Times review of Mallon’s new book, Stacy Schiff aptly observed: “It is as if text and e-mail messages are of this world, a letter an attempt, however illusory, to transcend it.”

Perhaps, then, typeface has made our writing habits a little less romantic. Alhough the digitized word has its downfalls, one cannot deny that we owe much to it. Indeed, we have gradually become reliant on it. It is the main source of communication for many of us, in both formal and informal contexts.

The Global Language Monitor, a program that records the most popular phrases or words in print and on the Internet in digital media and blogs, claimed that “Twitter” is the most frequently used word of 2009. Here are a few other interesting results. (Their corresponding numbers signify where in the list they were placed.):
2. Obama
3. H1N1
5. Vampire
11. Outrage
13. Unemployed

These words are hardly surprising, which is in itself rather disheartening. They reflect what many of us have been collectively feeling and thinking, and reveal our society to be composed of a preoccupied group of people with an odd penchant for so-called sexy vampires. In a simple list of words, one is able to detect what concerns and what personalities are emerging from American culture.

Whether written or typed, words are, essentially, embodiments of ourselves on paper. Fiona Banner, a contemporary British artist whose work depicts the nature of words, made a piece this year titled “Anatomy of a Book.” It is an open book, face down, with its separate parts labeled: spine, face, and back. Books, the vessels that guard our words, have our anatomy as well. Even when we dissect them, they are delightfully inseparable from our bodies and identities.