Thanks to both of you. An experiment shows me that Ctrl+spacebar apparently runs Selection.Font.Reset. I don't know how to write macros (I've tried to learn a couple of times but get lost; not my forté), but perhaps I can record one and substitute the Selection.ClearCharacterDirectFormatting for whatever appears in that position.

The problem I faced will remain one of those Word mysteries. In my experience (again, not knowing background coding), there are occasions when someone(s) has managed to do something inadvertently that causes Word confusion. I suspect that some of it may be in the realm of combined char/para styles, when people paste para-styled text with an included pilcrow into the middle of a paragraph. Anyway, as with Word tables, styles can get bollixed up.

Charles, off-topic somewhat, but regarding the info in the link you sent about TOC and direct formatting, maybe I am misunderstanding something. It didn't seem to deal with styling of the TOC styles, which trump the heading style and formatting. So, for instance, if my Heading 1 is Baskerville and I locally change a few words in, say, my first such heading to Arial, but if my TOC 1 style is Calibri 11, my TOC will be in Calibri 11. At least, that's what I get when using Custom TOC, which I always do, because I style font, size, and indents in the TOC styles.