Comic Sans is evil, apparently

I've been enjoying April Fools day as much as I ever do. It's great having the day off from teaching (it's the last day of Spring Break.)  Teaching on April Fools day is sometimes an awful thing.  Once I had kids dump water all over my chair (it's not plastic, but cushioned) and say "April Fools!".  I wasn't thrilled at the idea of not having a proper desk chair for the few days it took to completely air dry out.  Then there was the time that they replaced all the water in my water bottle with white vinegar.  Fun times. (Note the use of a period.)

Now our dear friends at Google have this April Fools joke where you begin to type the word "Helvetica" into the search bar and it automatically switches to the much hated font Comic Sans.  Now, it was only recently that I discovered how much Comic Sans is hated by the wider world. Being in an elementary school, I tend to run into Comic Sans quite a bit.  I wasn't sure why until I ran into this article from The New Republic, which says that actual research went into this.  It turns out that Comic Sans is "the most popular of the four fonts the researchers tested on children."
There is actually a website: bancomicsans.com which is, well, pretty self-explanatory. And here's another article on it from the UK: "Why does everyone hate Comic Sans so much?" Comic Sans was invented by Microsoft (Shake fists at them!) to help the no longer used "Microsoft Bob" be more kid friendly as it would explain to the kids how to use Microsoft. Those were the 90s, when kids still didn't know much about word processing, I guess. Interesting quote from that article by a graphic designer:

Comic Sans just isn't designed well. It was never made to be printed and yet it is everywhere I look. Hardly a day goes by when I don't see it in an inappropriate setting. I would just appeal to people to be more thoughtful. When I get an invitation to the funeral of a friend and it is written in Comic Sans, I just find that thoughtless. It is an epidemic.

I used to use Comic Sans, but I did end up switching to other fonts for my everyday fonts because I just got tired of it very quickly.  I usually use Tahoma as the default font.  I know others in my school who prefer Arial, which I like also.

So for my last day of Spring Break, I've used my time searching out all the Comic Sans hatred and tried to get Rachel Maddow to trend on Twitter (#maddow) - It's her birthday and...oh, nevermind...
I don't really have such a visceral hatred of Comic Sans, though. I just find it mildly irritating due to its overuse.  Now when it comes to Times New Roman - I can get a little violent.  So, watch it.