Word of the Day: fraktur

fraktur (n)

[frahk-toor]

A style of type: German black-letter text, or "stylized, highly decorative watercolor or watercolor-and-ink painting in the Pennsylvania-German tradition, often bearing elaborate calligraphy and standardized motifs, as birds, tulips, mermaids, and unicorns, and typically appearing on a book page, baptismal certificate or other family record, or merchant's advertisement." (dictionary.com)

"He himself dismissed such praise: 'All I do is try to rescue the fine traditions of our people — and touch them up a bit with my own fraktur.'"
--James Albert Michener, The Novel

Fraktur is that creepy Germanic type often seen in the names of newspapers, most notably The New York Times. Somehow, whenever I see it outside of the newspaper logo context, it always reminds me of Hitler. And I don't like being reminded of him. I used to wonder if there is anyone in the world today whose last name is Hitler. Amazingly enough, if you search whitepages.com for that name, there are quite a few, both male and female, some of whom even sport the first name "Adolph". Life must be...interesting...for them.

(Fraktur, by the way, is one of the words that the late David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.)