On Lavender Unicorns, Comic Sans, and Particle Physics · 8:48pm Nov 15th, 2016
In these dark and divisive times, can I avoid controversy and blog about something light-hearted?
On 4 July 2012, Fabiola Gianotti, the spokesperson of the ATLAS experiment at CERN gave a presentation to the media on the discovery of strong evidence for a new particle which looked very much like the Higgs Boson. Naturally this exciting news was widely reported. However as many commentators were not clever enough to think of anything intelligent to say about the physics, they instead the focussed on another detail: her presentation was written in Comic Sans.
Anyone who has studied design long enough to have addressed the question of which font to use, will have picked up the advice: Don’t use Comic Sans. Just don’t. Why? Because it’s Comic Sans. The official advice from expert typographers is that this font must never ever be used as it is just so intolerably bad.
However this expert advice is happily disregarded by children, teachers, and senior physicists worldwide. In the particle physics world, a senior professor giving a presentation in a silly font is really not news. It happens all the time. The skills and mind-set required to excel at mathematical physics are different from those required for designing stylish slides. And it seems a lot of theoretical physicists rather like it. Perhaps it is with a certain nostalgia for the days when they wrote their presentations on a blackboard or OHP view foils. Perhaps they feel they are so intellectually superior that they don’t need to follow rules designed for other people.
But why does Comic Sans generate such strong negative opinions? The font was created by designer Vincent Connare with very noble intentions: to make a warm child-friendly font, with soft rounded letters, to enhance software users’ experience, inspired by the hand-drawn type in comic books. But once it was distributed with Windows 95, Comic Sans was enthusiastically adopted by design-challenged home computer users worldwide. It appeared on advertising, greetings cards, and restaurant menus. And also in textbooks and physics presentations.
Comic Sans has unfortunately been a victim of its own success. In other circumstances, it might have found its place among the thousands of available typefaces, and been used in situations where it is entirely appropriate. Yet it has now been so widely used in so many situations where it wasn’t really appropriate, that the mere sight of those friendly letters is enough to make professional designers cringe. The retaliation has been brutal. There is no room for compromise. Comic Sans must be banned.
But scientists are anarchists at heart, and the particle physics world’s fondness for Comic Sans has only been increased by the attack on Fabiola by the typeface police.
Comic Sans has suffered a similar fate that which befell the expression Lavender Unicorn within the Fimfiction community. When I first read those words, I thought it was a lovely turn of phrase. I like the subtle scent of lavender, which evokes wonderful memories of walks through sun-drenched fields of purple flowers in the south of France. I am also a big fan of Twilight Sparkle. Putting the two together is a brilliant combination which just makes me want to rub my nose up against my favourite plushie and rejoice in the glorious girlie fun of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
But sadly this is not an expression which can be used in community-approved fics. Lavender Unicorn is not a valid poetic expression, or a legitimate pseudonym for the Princess of Friendship. It is a syndrome. Use it and you will be accused of ‘literal lavender unicorn syndrome’ by some smart reviewer.
Actually Lavender Unicorn Syndrome is something a bit different. This is well documented in various writing guides as the tendency of inexperienced writers to replace characters names with a descriptive phrase an excessive amount. It is a thing to be aware of, but not a strict rule. It is certainly not a justified reason to outlaw the use of the phrase lavender unicorn.
Unfortunately, in times past, the fimfiction literati decided it was necessary to hunt down every last remaining lavender unicorn on the site in order to enforce the regulation Ernest Hemingway style of writing which they preferred (or at least they had been told in English class was correct). The idea that a bit of flowery ornamentation and girlie frivolity might be entirely appropriate to pony fanfiction apparently did not occur to them. At one time, things reached a point where no writer could ever use an adjective + noun alternative to a character’s name without attracting cries of “Lavender Unicorn Syndrome!”, not because it was a significant problem impairing their fic, but because the name sounded really cool and every amateur reviewer was actively looking for a chance to use it and show off that they knew what it meant. Following a post-postmodernist naming convention, we could call this, Lavender Unicorn Syndrome Syndrome.
In the spirit of fighting to defend love and tolerance, I say Yay! Lavender Unicorns and Comic Sans!
But if you want people to take your pony fic or your presentation on Higgs physics seriously, it’s probably safer to avoid both.
Pinkie could always do a presentation in Lavender Skeleton Sans.
Then again, to me style is a NORI REDAC Engineering Brick. Everything else is decorative.
Unless its a 3 dimentional mapping of a 4 dimentional dynamically adaptive fractal antenna.
Hmm, wonder how useful the Higgs function is to an N * N point alignment grid in extended DnD style RPGs where true neutral and extremes are both unlikely and so most people orbit an average radius from True Neutral?
So, is the bottom image broken for anyone else, or just me?
The term is a "poetic kenning," and most reviewers wouldn't know what that was if it bit them on their flesh-plush sitting-cushions.
4303746 I don't know that "Lavender Unicorn" is a poetic kenning as it's a literal description. My understanding is a kenning is a metaphorical description. http://www.poetryarchive.org/glossary/kenning
4303722 Broken for me, too. Think it's the upload site not playing nice with fimfiction (or vice-versa).
4303721 Quick search shows... aren't Nori and Redac 2 different brands of brick?
Unrelatedly, what would you use a 4 dimensional antenna for? I'm going to assume for simplicity that there's a 4th spatial dimension in this model, as any 3D antenna is in a sense 4D as it exists for non-zero time. 'Course it could be 4D to detect some sort of time-like signal I guess but what would that even mean? *ahem* Anyway, I suppose a spatially 4D "antenna" of a sort could receive off-brane graviton signals under the brane-bulk model.
Regardless, remarkably entertaining piece here, Pineta. I only vaguely recall hearing about Lavender Unicorn Syndrome. I've never followed fimfiction politics (as it were) enough to know about reviewers tracking down (and presumably downvoting as I assume such stories wouldn't be actually removed) stories which don't use a Hemminway-ian style. Much as I like that style, it's not for all peoples or all pieces.
4303746 Point the first: Where's the metaphor that should lie at the heart of any kenning? It's just an overly-fancy color name combined with a tribe, the sort of thing you might see in a police report. "Perp is a female lavender unicorn about 6hh with striped purple mane and starburst marks on her flanks." Your prototypical Anglo-Norse kennings are, well, poetic. They describe things in a non-literal way that requires imagination and creativity to interpret. LUS, at best, just requires a tediously exhaustive list of rare color words. (I long for the day I see a fic describing our favorite "fashionista" as eburnean, just so I can cross that off.)
Point the second: Even if it is a kenning, shoving fancy poetic usages into every corner of your prose is a bad idea, whether it's abuse of alliteration all around or a rhyme every time. Those should be unusual, appearing a few times in a fic, or not at all. A fic in which every chapter has a dozen alliterative phrases strewn about at random and every other paragraph ending in a rhyme is probably a bad fic.
I mean, sure, you can write an excellent fic that's a repeating alphabetic acrostic. In the original Klingon. But let's face it, 99.9% of such tries are going to be garbage, and it's right to criticize clumsy failures for having attempted something they were unable to do right.
At the very least, the vitriol surrounding LUS seems to have largely tapered off.
Or maybe I just filter out comments harping on it...
My word, I had no idea we weren't allowed to call Twilight a lavender Unicorn. I shall from now on refer to her as a purple horn-horse.
To play … what's the opposite of a devil's advocate? … for a moment, I think there are defensible reasons to avoid "lavender unicorn" et.al. in MLP fanfiction regardless of the social opprobium. With that description you're focusing attention on facts that your reader is basically guaranteed to know — we're reading fanfic because we're already fans of the visual show. That label reduces the information content of your text. You're playing Captain Obvious.
But doesn't it break up, say, long strings of dialogue — keeping your wording fresh and varied by tagging Twilight as "the lavender unicorn" instead of using her name time after time? The argument there is the same argument for using saidisms instead of the boring old "said" — and that's something that's discouraged in modern writing, as well.
And in general — not just in ponyfic — I've found that a character's physical appearance is usually the least interesting thing about them. As you start getting into drama and confrontations, it becomes much more important what they feel and think and how they emote rather than what color their hair is. (Exercise: Take a page from your favorite original fiction book, rewrite it with half of the names replaced with "the blond"/"the brunette"/"the redhead", and see how much more strangely it reads.) Don't squander your focus on things you should have already fixed in the reader's head long ago. Keep them with you as you hit the emotional beats.
Disclaimer: Part of the Fimfiction literati
Funnily enough, this weekend, I participated in 4303858's communal writing excercise and we ended up writing a story that both invoked the Higgs Boson and deserved to be typed in Comic Sans.
In any case, I speak as a former sufferer of acute LUS. (Just take a look at my first story on this site. Actually, don't.) It can definitely go too far. Trying to come up with yet another way to mention a character because you feel you should only use her name every five or six paragraphs is a bad place to be.
That said, there probably is some middle ground, but trying to find it will probably get you burned at the stake for bringing the plague into town. Metaphorically speaking. I hope.
To: Comic Sans Haters
From: Sans
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Comic Sans is one of my besties!
By the by, I detest LUS enough that I use a script to replace common LUS instances with their simplest and most general substitution (the character's name, with a little tweak so I can tell that a substitution was made in those rare cases it makes a difference). For the edification of those few poor fools who can read JS-flavored regexen, I figured I might post the patterns used. (The "all" function returns a pattern fragment matching any of the possible permutations of the passed-in strings in the given order.)
(Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash have enough possible matches to require two lines here.) From this it is of course trivial to see who is Best Pony, as having the fewest possible replacements. Haha! It's Princess Celestia, whom I have never observed to suffer LUS, and who therefore simply isn't present in the list at all. Joke's on me.
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These days, purple wing-horse is acceptable as well.
Comic Sans supposedly helps dyslexic people read reliably, but a quick Google search gives me conflicting information so idk about that.
As for Lavender Unicorn Syndrome? I think it's definitely a stylistic choice to use 'lavender unicorn' in place of Twilight every once in while, but it starts to become a problem the moment it becomes excessive. My general rule of thumb is to mention a character by name as often as possible while still maintaining the flow of the writing, which seems to work rather nicely.