In type design, professionals often discuss letter spacing in binary terms: good or bad, right or wrong. But that language belies the influence of designers' decisions and the broad range of legitimate opinions about when — and where — the spacing of a typeface succeeds or fails. My own research deals with the practical problem of assessing spacing on its qualitative merits, while looking for some quantitative way to separate the truly excellent from the barely acceptable. This talk will explore how designers talk about spacing and my attempt to link what we say to what we really mean and, hopefully, to the decisions we make as we design typefaces.