I share your snobbery, believe me (and to let authors have any input on design constitutes publisher malpractice). Nonetheless, I’d rather live in a hyper-DIY cultural world than be relegated to, eg, major-label bands, studio movies, network television, MSM newsgathering, etc.

…what is it with the Brits and their yews?
Honour, harbour, flavour, and cetera.

I don’t know how the letters got into the words in the first place, but they were taken out of Am.Eng. in what was, as far as I know, the only successful deliberate spelling reform of that language, ever: Noah Webster dropped them in his 1806 Compendious Dictionary of the English Language and somehow he got everyone to go along with it.

Anyway, I know it’s due to the Norman invasion and all, but is that adequate to explain it?

As a publishing professional working in an organisation where authors have the last word on design I’d say that the comma after ‘crap’ should be changed to a full point, and the last 17 words deleted.

In support of my case I cite Comic Sans

Under the hood of computers, it still has that meaning, e.g.:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/java/awt/Font.html
There are three different names that you can get from a Font object. The logical font name is the same as that used by java.awt.Font in JDK 1.1 and earlier releases. The font face name, or just font name for short, is the name of a particular font face, like Helvetica Bold. The family name is the name of the font family that determines the typographic design across several faces, like Helvetica. The font face name is the one that should be used to specify fonts. This name signifies actual fonts in the host system, and does not identify font names with the shape of font characters as the logical font name does.

Yes, I thought it might be something like that. As a proud (or “prod”) speaker of British English, I will start writing “fount” forthwith. (Or even fourthwith.)

And, of course, if you’re getting really picky, it’s not “all the characters,” it’s a certain number of each character based on the foundry’s anticipation of the printer’s frequency of use. (And special characters sometimes did not even come with a standard font.)

The Handristry quote is poignant. Many craftspeople bemoan the fact that mastering handskills is no longer necessary to become a successful designer. This seems like a conservative’s limited view to me; democratization of design certainly results in a lot of crap, but it also opens us to imaginations that otherwise may never have had a chance to contribute.

Your description of ‘typeface’ is sort of, vaguely, roughly on the right lines.

‘Font’ used to have a very precise meaning, which is why typographers of a certain generation find it hard to accept the new expanded usage for the term. It used to refer to the character set (= all the characters, yes punctuation, numerals, as well as letters) of a typeface at any particular size and any particular style (style here means weight, slope, width, etc). So, 12 pt italic Monotype Baskerville was a font. It had a price, and you could buy just that font. In the days of hand-set type, a font came wrapped in brown paper: a nice smallish packet. 18 pt italic Monotype Baskerville was a different font, and it sold for a different price. 18 pt bold Monotype Baskerville was still another font.

By the way, it’s important to specify the name of the manufacturer: Monotype or Linotype or Stempel, etc. Because their Baskvervilles all looked a bit different from each other: they were different designs.

When the material dimension of type finally disappeared – when type became software, from the mid-1980s onwards – then this thoroughly material term ‘font’ lost its strict meaning, and the term became generalized and began to displace the term ‘typeface’.

Here, as in other departments of life, one can learn from a fully historical, materialist analysis!