The Polite Type - Disarming bullies one word at a time

Disarming bullies one word at a time

The Polite Type is an open-source font that rewrites hurtful words, replacing them with more inclusive ones. The Polite Type is meant to be used for educational purposes, at schools or by parents - one way to approach this issue and to create a safe space for discussion.

Development

The library of words deemed hurtful has been put together in collaboration with people from different origins, religions, world views and sexual orientations. As a result, a database of positive use cases, negative use cases, and their corresponding substitutions is gathered in the CSV format to develop the substitution rules for the font.

An OpenType feature file is a text file that contains the typographic layout feature specifications for an OpenType font. The bespoke Polite Type font initially contains a feature file with standard ligatures (e.g. fi, ff, ffi).

To enable more advanced word recognition and substitution, we updated the original feature file with missing ligatures from our extensive word database. We utilized the lookup feature and FontLab, a font editor compatible with OpenType fonts. As a result, the font file now boasts nearly 2000 ligatures to recognise and replace negative use cases, including the blur symbol cases.

The Symbol

The blur is an integrated part of the design for the words that have no literal translation, or their meaning is too broad to replace with just one word or their purpose is only that of hurting someone. Blurring is commonly used as a way to censor or to hide something offensive, but it has never before been used as a symbol in a font.

Blur symbol is included as ligatures in the feature file. They can be scaled to fit any word. To achieve this, we divide the blur symbol into multiple parts (e.g. bl1, bl2, bl3) and condition to place them in different word sizes.

Towards inclusivity

Hurtful words can come in different forms. We therefore want to increase the sensitivity of word recognition and substitution. We considered variations in capitalization and word length to ensure comprehensive coverage.

The font utilizes a continuously expanding vocabulary. Its open-source approach invites those who want to develop it further to get involved. We are glad to receive feedback on the current vocabulary and chosen substitutive words, as words can have multiple meanings.