FOR A YEAR OF MY LIFE, I DEALT INTIMATELY with Gill Sans, a font used everywhere and for all things. I’m no typographer, and I’m not even particularly interested in typography as a hobby, but I don’t think I’m wrong in naming it as one of the worst contributions to the Western aesthetic, right up there with reality television and icicle Christmas lights.

There are other offensive fonts, but I think most of us know which ones those are. Comic Sans, of course, is a godawful font, but that is something most of us learn in middle school. Anything that looks overly-stylized — too gothic, too futuristic, too thematic — is usually pretty bad.

But I can forgive these fonts their offenses. They are gaudy. They know their limitations.

What I despise about Gill Sans is its insidiousness.

People use this font, and use it deliberately. I suspect they think they are achieving some kind of sense of sophisticated neutrality.

Here’s a hint: you are not.

In truth, there is nothing neutral about Gill Sans. Once you begin to recognize the Gill Sans stamp, there’s no going back, and there’s no mistaking it.

It will haunt you the way it does me, even when you are doing things you enjoy. It takes you by surprise when you begin realizing how much of our world is infected.

For a while, I thought I was alone, but last year, the staff of The Collegian voted to oust Gill Sans from the page, much to my relief.

Many of us, in fact, had just become tired of the font, its limitations and its demands. But I’m not sure anyone hated it quite as much as I did.

But then, just a few months ago, I stumbled across a blog entry at UnderConsideration.com, wherein a whole slew of Gills Sans haters came out of the closet. Finally, in reading this blog, I began to feel like part of a community. Their concerns, which frequently matched up with mine, empowered me with the ability to articulate my distaste.

Here are just a few of the problems: