My first guess is somewhat like Tom Clancy's opinions on Dirty Smelly Hippies, e.g. naive at best, more likely dangerous "useful idiots" for some hostile agency or an Old One doing the costume thing. This is not to say Laundry and Christianity can't go together, Bob's friend shows there is some way, it just says that, to use a stereotype, I can quite easily see a Jesuit in the Laundry, an Dominican, not so much.
]]>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut
Thing is, us fiends are a fickle lot, elaborate in our designs, refined in our taste, jaded in our demands. So while I agree on the idea of using a difficult to read script, I somewhat prefer a more fluid, "decadent" style. ;)
]]>Using the NSA Precrime Futureview-o-matic to steal my ideas again, hey? Well, I'll see your Markov chains and raise you random passes in and out of English via Google Translate before Markov training/processing! haHA!
I've been screwing around with this sort of thing on and off (mostly off in this decade) since the days of the AltaVista Babelfish, but the Markov chain post on Boing Boing fired up the part of my brain where this particular brand of madness is enthroned and back to work!
Your choice of corpus: brilliant. Currently, I'm fiddling with heavily downvoted youtube comments, 80s television show intros/theme song lyrics, and random advertising copy. Results: http://medianoretornable.net/2013/12/07/better-poetry-via-the-power-of-science/
I'm currently working on hooking my script up to a single threaded page crawler and turning it loose for some seriously random textual jazz but I won't have time to complete my 21st Century rendition of Finnegan's Wake Performed Live By The Internet if you invoke the Second Coming of Jeezthulu Our Lord And Slaver.
]]>Well, the whole Nazi thing might be part of it. Certainly didn't help.
]]>Speaking of Metal Umlauts, I've been wanting to make a fake band t-shirt with Shpëelküß in gothic letters. That's supposed to be Shpilkes: Yiddish for the feeling of being on pins and needles.
]]>long story short, broken typefaces were originally not only used in german-speaking areas, they originally stem from northern france. but they persisted somewhat longer in those. when napoleon invaded the holy roman empire, they became something of a sign of resistance against the french, where of course, anti-napoleonic sentiments had their usual stints into reactionary and antisemitic ideas, even the modern non-religious racist.
as seen in the article, later on there was some discussion about phasing them out in favour of antiqua, with the support somewhat in line with the nationalist, which, alas, was quite diverse. the passover prayer book mentioned might be an example.
of course, part of those later wound up with the nazis, and first of there was some support for the fraktur types with those. thing is, this was the voelkish movement, where hitler was quite inimical to them, so in 1941 fraktur types were branded as "schwabach jew letters" and declared obsolete in a letter by bormann. the same letter using a fraktur head might show how this was enforced.
i'm aware of the connotations, i just don't think them quite appropiatete. that is not to say some of the more "modern" fractured groteske like e.g. tannenberg scream "the black corps" to me. others, otoh, are more in line with sauerbraten. of goethe.
]]>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter
e.g. to give a certain "traditional" feel. And quite a lot of the books from before the 20th century are printed in it, so if you have a little bibliophile streak, you are likely to be confronted with it.
Then, there are some guys who like it for various reasons, e.g. aethetics, it seems one Hermann Hesse wanted his books printed in Fraktur. On the slightly nutty level, we have one society trying to reintroduce it, arguing inter alias it's more applicable to the German language, there are some special signs common to Fraktur fonts usually not implemented in Antiqua fonts, though they forget to mention the same signs already have Antiqua versions, and even with Fraktur, they were infrequently used. And then there is quite some, err, misaimed fandom...
As for the haggadah, as already said I wouldn't be that surprised if some conservative German Jews stood on the Fraktur side of the Antiqua-Fraktur debate, especially since many German Jews were quite open at demonstrating their patriotism, where it might be of interest that full citizenship for all German Jews AFAIK only came with the German Unification of 1871. Let's just say the Germany had a strange way of showing its graditude...
One of the leading states with emancipation was BTW Prussia, which might be somewhat symptomatic for the somewhat complicated heritage of said country, yes, there was quite some militarism, but also a relative openness to minorities and immigrants, e.g. French Hugenotts. And at the end of Weimar, one of the last bastions of democracy was Prussia, which was only abolished through a somewhat coup d'etat:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preußenschlag
As for my personal relation to Fraktur, I think it's part of German literary history, the first Gutenberg bible was set in a somewhat related font, and old books are set in it, but I really can't stand the mysticism around. And then there is the misaimed fandom, for some mostly harmless examples, I think Rammstein somewhat funny, and have some, err, fond though somewhat intoxicated memories about listening to their first album "Herzeleid" with some metalheads during one late 90s, though in general I can't take "Neue deutsche Härte"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Deutsche_Härte
serious, and the joke got old quite fast.
As for "schpilkes", while "auf Nadeln sitzen" or "to sit on needles" is a widely used phrase in Modern German, I'm not aware of this word in contemporary German, though there are plenty of Yiddish terms in German, somewhat more in slangs, dialect or sociolects. Since those are somewhat phased out by High German in many areas, actually quite a few of those have a "folkish" tone to them. It seems like it comes from "spilke", a form of "spille", which actually is a word for a spinning spindle. And the surname corresponding to somebody manufacturing those, e.g. "Spilker", is moderately common in some parts of Germany, though there might be some risk of it running you into trouble in others. Not so much for any antisemitism, but it seems to be somewhat confined to Eastern Westphalia, and there are some jokes about the animosity between those and the Westphalians around Münster. Which are only wholly exagerrated...
Whatever, sorry for the excursion, back to text.
]]>http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Necronomicon
there was a Blackletter version in the 15th century in Germany, which might have been in Schwabacher or some other forerunner of Fraktur, since Fraktur proper is said to stem from the early 16th century. ;)
Note this was the Latin version by Olaus Wormius, and historically, Latin texts were mostly set in Antiqua even in Germany. And as already mentioned, it was likely no Fraktur, but some other Blackletter font. But I guess a version of the Necronomicon with a similar Blackletter font to the ones used in certain psalters, e.g.
http://www.alterlittera.com/al_htm/oldtype/psalterium.htm
with some uncials and differing text colours for some first letters, likely some miniatures etc. would be quite nice. For the appearance of age and reverance, I might add, not for being "evil", since, as we all know, the Old Ones transcend us mortal apes notions of good and evil, right and wrong, they revel in ...
Er, sorry, got carried away. Of course, if we wanted to go for a true medieval feeling, e.g. some codex, there would be some other font to use, maybe one of the minuscles like the Carolingian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule
or the Greek one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_minuscule
For me, Fraktur would be too modern for this.
]]>The uses and applications are endless!
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