Do we have any typography experts left over from those heady Rathergate days? Can you tell me what this is?

Right! It’s the letter ‘S’ from the typeface named “Group Sex,” a TrueType font available at various free font download sites (like this one.)

I am showing you the letter ‘S’ because it is one of the only letters I can show you. All of the glyphs feature naked stick-figures posed into letterforms, but most of them feature great big stick-genitals arising from the male figures. ‘S’ was an exception.

According to my research, this cartoon-smut font has been kicking around the Internet since 1999, keeping a pretty low profile. But it’s in the news now. Last week, a teacher at Pine Tree Elementary school in New York State prominently used this salacious “Group Sex” font in a handout to parents of her third-grade students.

It’s all a misunderstanding, says the school.

[A]t first glance, it’s difficult to make out the salaciousness of the type font. Sources said the teacher had no idea the alphabet was offensive when she downloaded the font from the Internet.

Okay, I’ll grant that these characters don’t look smutty at first glance, especially if you’re not expecting to find anything raunchy. But how do you accidentally download a font clearly named “Group Sex”? And then accidentally choose the “Group Sex” font in your word processing program from your pull-down menu of fonts, until you come to the one named “Group Sex”? Shouldn’t that have been a tip-off? Does this spelling teacher not speak English?

And why does this Times Herald-Record article name three specific persons — the school principal, the superintendent, and the PTA president — but leave out the name of the teacher who printed the handout? Is that weird?

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin isn’t buying the alibi.

AND MUCH DISCUSSION: in the comments to this post. We all think Michelle jumped the gun.