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  • 2001-09-22 (xsd:date)
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  • Wingdings Font's Secret Messages (en)
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  • In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center came the resurgence of some several-year-old rumors about secret messages lurking within Microsoft's symbolic Webdings and Wingdings fonts, one innocuous and the other supposedly pointedly anti-Semitic: typing the letters NYC using the Webdings font in Microsoft Word (or similar application) produced, as shown below, an image of an eye, a heart, and a city skyline, assumed to be a rebus form of the phrase I love New York (although the last image could really be any big city skyline). But switching to the WingDings font produced an image of a skull and crossbones, a Star of David, and a thumbs-up symbol, read by some conspiracy-minded folks as a symbolic approval of the killing of Jews: The images associated with the capital letters N-Y-C in the Webdings font, at least, were deliberately chosen, as Microsoft spokesperson Kimberly Kuresman explained in 2001: The darker message supposedly associated with those same letters in the Wingsdings font was noted as far back as 1992, when the New York Post tabloid published an breathless article about the discovery of a secret anti-Semitic message apparently urging death to Jews in New York City: When this conspiracy rumor resurfaced and began to blaze its way around the Internet immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Microsoft issued a statement disclaiming any malicious intent and explaining why the font had not since been altered to put the issue to rest: Wired magazine also interviewed a typographer who noted that the arrangement of symbols in the Wingdings font was surely nothing more than coincidence: (Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller fame, also penned a caustic essay on this phenomenon for PC Computing back in 1992.) The last coincidence mentioned in the example quoted at the head of this page, that the arrangements of symbols corresponding to the string Q33NY in the Wingdings font is a sign that Microsoft were involved in the terrorist attack, is purely a contrived one. Although typing the characters Q-3-3-N-Y in the Wingdings font does produce the string of images shown below (an airplane, two vertical rectangular shapes, a skull and crossbones, and a Star of David), none of this has any real relevance to the 9/11 attacks: Q33NY was not the flight or tail number of either of the planes that were crashed into the World Trade Center that day, the rectangular shapes represent pieces of paper with writing on them, not buildings, and the terrorist attacks were neither perpetrated by nor targeted against Jews. The numerous suggestions that have since been offered about what 'Q33' really does refer to (everything from a New York bus route to a verse from the Quran) merely highlight how easy it is to find significance in anything, meaningful or not. (en)
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