foe
- (adj.) next (to), adjacent
- (v.) to be next to
- (prep.) next to
- (n.) the area next to
He foe ei i ia!
“Let me get next to you!”
Notes: Well, actually that’d properly be foemu, but I’ve committed to using the word as it is in the entry title, so I fudged. This is a shortening of the line from the famous Itchy & Scratchy episode “Itchy & Scratchy Meet Fritz the Cat”. Heh, heh…
So I never do this anymore (or try not to, anyway), but I saw the iku for foe and absolutely had to change it. See, foe is a simple ikunoala—a combination of fo and oe—and the latter is built off of the iku for ta, just like the iku for me is. We saw a combination of fo and me just the other day, so by all rights, this iku should look just the same, the only difference being the line. Instead, the iku looked like this:
Now, it’s fine if that’s just how one happens to draw the iku one time. But a regularized font is supposed to present certain shapes in the same style so you can recognize that it’s a unified font—otherwise what you end up with is a ransom note. Given the combinations present in foe and fome, there’s absolutely no reason the basic shapes (specifically the tails at the bottom) should look so different. So I had to redo it.
And so you get the image at the top. Takes about the same amount of time to edit one character in the font as it does twenty, so it feels like a waste of time, but, darn it, it was worth it! I can sleep easy tonight.