I don’t like Times New Roman. Not because it’s a bad font, but because it’s used in prob­a­bly 90% of all the doc­u­ments I read (other than books), which is stu­pid. Times New Roman is named after the Times of Lon­don, for which it was com­mis­sioned in 1931. (Their pre­vi­ous font is now known as Times Old.)

What both­ers me is that peo­ple refer to the faces in the fam­ily as “Times New Roman Italic,” “Times New Roman Bold,” and so on. It doesn’t make sense because “Roman” and “Italic,” for exam­ple, are mutu­ally exclu­sive: “Roman” implies upright, normal-weight text. But this isn’t really the fault of anyone’s igno­rance. The two foundries that pro­duce Times New Roman today (Lino­type and Mono­type) per­pet­u­ate this strange convention.