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At least stabbing has the whole Brutus thing and depicts additional information; "Knifes": betrays as well as attacks. But why not just say "betrays"? If there's one thing Americans seem to universally hate, it's syllables.
Ow, my ears! So big sound for so little letters! Make read out loud bad!!!
It's an affectation left over from the days when the editor had to find a compromise between the size of the type he wanted for the big headline and the number of letters that would fit on the page. Betrays has one more letter than Knifes. As you mentioned, "knifes" is also better because of everyone who will get the reference to Julius Cæsar.
Oooo! Ooooo! Oooooooooo!!!! Now's my time to shine with useless information I learned in a college class that I dropped!
When using a printing press, there are multiple metal stamps of each letter. WHEN YOU WERE USING THE BIG LETTERS, YOU'D REACH FOR THE ONES ON THE "UPPER CASE", while the smaller more frequently used letters were kept on the "lower case".
And when you needed more s p a c e between letters, you'd use more of the blank metal blocks, which were made from lead, which is why that spacing us called leading.
Finally, some printing press operators discovered that if you made letters too small, they'd become hard to read, but that you could take advantage of the blank space inside the letter blocks by designing the letters from corner to corner diagonally instead of straight up and down to fit more condensed letters on a single page—this space-saving leaning style was pioneered in Italy. To lean your letters like this was to do like the Italians did, hence your printing style was italicized.
Oooh, I didn't realize italics made it possible to put bigger letters in smaller spaces! Thanks, Professor!
Yeah! It would buy you an extra couple lines per page, reducing the page count while maintaining readability. When fonts start exploring surface area, you know shit's about to go off.
That's certainly part of it. But it's also a nation trend in communication. Trump has done a brilliant job at weaponizing and popularizing clipped, terse, sparse, blunt, chunky, speaking. He's basically made headlines into a kind of vernacular, where everything is at once overly explicit and yet open to interpretation. Like, tone over content, and difficulty to ignore over clarity. It's less that he has invented it, and more like he identified it, but has used it as a form of lexical gamesmanship. Set the narrative by being the one that's remembered, fidelity to truth be damned. And giving his black-hole-like ability to bend discourse to be on his terms, everyone is falling in line and speaking in big dumb wooden blocks in order to remain competitive.