Lettering

The sun had faded the lettering on the sign.

The principle difference between lettering and typography is that typography is based on fonts, which are static letterforms, and letter shapes formed by lettering are fluid and malleable.

Nothing could well resemble less a typical English street than the interminable avenue, rich in incongruities, through which our two travelers advanced—looking out on each side of them at the comfortable animation of the sidewalks, the high-colored, heterogeneous architecture, the huge white marble facades glittering in the strong, crude light, and bedizened with gilded lettering, the multifarious awnings, banners, and streamers, the extraordinary number of omnibuses, horsecars, and other democratic vehicles, the vendors of cooling fluids, the white trousers and big straw hats of the policemen, the tripping gait of the modish young persons on the pavement, the general brightness, newness, juvenility, both of people and things.

The morning was drizzling, this 28th of December of 2024. (Incidentally, there are 28 letters in the Esperanto alphabet.) I walked to Tim Hortons, there to eat a croissant and a hash brown, and to drink an oat milk iced coffee. Amongst the vendors were handsome men, Joban and Pushpak. The ladies were pretty. They were all South Asians. There was a fat Eurasian boy toddler with his white mama and Sinospheric papa amongst the customers. At our house, Rex, the cousin of my cousin Eve, arrived from the states. A devout Roman Catholic Filipino, he was wearing a necklace with a hanging crucifix when he greeted me. I exclaimed "Mr. Lingo!": Like I, he has been a long-time language fanatic, and now he is learning Portuguese and Polish. He knows that my "favourite" is Esperanto. He amused himself with my dark red T-shirt with the vertical phrase in white letters in Spanish: "¡Las estrellas son Australias!" ("The stars are Australias!" about outer space and potential future colonies on the cold and hot desert worlds beyond our Earth). I was wearing also a red baseball cap with yellow lettering of "XANADU, TITAN": a reference to a mystical region on Saturn's moon. Rex would be sojourning with my Filipino family, here on Lulu Island, for the weekend visit. He earlier communicated that he would want "bubble tea" from here. I complimented Rex that he still "looks the same" from decades ago.

The lettering on the sign made it clear that intruders were unwelcome.

The lettering on the sign was very tidy.