How would you call the italic equivalent of serifs?

Tail?

Serifs.

Fwiw, I don’t disagree with Hrant that language shapes thought. Rather, I disagree that labeling these design features as “entry and exit strokes” is problematic. That is the origin of these things, and this is a very reasonable label as a result. One that is immediately comprehensible.

Nothing wrong with going beyond that into a discussion of notan and chirographic vs typographic forms, which I look forward to reading and discussing in that other thread, yay! But these particular features are very much chirographic in origin, so inventing some other word that requires teaching everyone what the word means would not really help communicate; quite the contrary, IMO.

To my mind, there are at least two different meanings among those four terms—perhaps even three.

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