Excerpt from an article by Aaron Sakulich, the entirety of which can be found here.
Apparently, to all of the kooks and nutjobs in the world, this means “New York City: Killing Jews is okay.” This font has been the subject of rumor and conspiracy theory since around 1992, when a number of newspapers discovered this diabolical code.
Since it was, apparently, the slowest news day in the history of mankind, articles began appearing about the anti-Semitic codes hidden in Microsoft’s software. It got so much press that the people who created the font had to take time out from their busy day to defend themselves. My understanding is that they’re nice people, don’t even remotely hate Jews and claim that this whole NYC business is a coincidence.
But is it? There are 255 characters in the Wingdings font. If you’re going to have these three characters in that set, what are the chances that they will appear in this order? Well, according to the chapter in a statistics book that I read in the twenty minutes between writing that last sentence and this one, the odds are one in 16,581,375.
Odds are actually 1:16,386,810, but not much difference.
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