Comment by tokai
4 years ago
I dont understand why you think you little language lesson is relevant. As you write yourself the true (german) meaning of the term is strange. Laymen thought they were bizarre and maybe ugly. But for most other they were seen as very aesthetic from the onset. Which is why these new fonts absolutely dominated the fraktur fonts. The reaction to them was more about a culture shock than an aesthetic disapproval.
It is a historic term and any interpretation were you call CS grotesk would be suspect.
The etymology of the term is from Latin (for "hidden grotto"), and English inherited denotations (Dictionary meanings) both from German font usage and from French. I was pointing out the connotation (colloquial meaning) in English of "ugly" simply that it shows evidence for a long standing cultural bias. Enough of a long standing cultural bias that people may call them "ugly" simply out of "cultural habit" without examining where that bias came from or why they feel that way.
I also subjectively think many of the grotesque fonts are quite pretty, and I like Comic Sans too, but if you are asking why people think they are "ugly", one of the reasons is "subconscious cultural bias" and the "language lesson" was pointing out deep evidence of that (at least in English speaking cultures).