an interesting notion

from Craig Dworkin's Reading the Illegible:

Grotesk = German word for sanserif

"The sanserif look that [Jan] Tschichold and his contemporaries took to be a self-evident zeitgeist evocation of radical modernity had originally been revived, at the end of the eighteenth century, as the signifier of the classical, conservative past. For the romantic-era reader, the sanserif -- in marked and diametric contrast to a mechanized modernity -- possessed the unmistakable 'associations of rugged antiquity.'"