April 27th, 2012 / 7:56 pm
 Snippets
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The New Yorker‘s diaeresis tic bothers some people.  It’s the double-dot thing they put in words like “coöperate” to tell you to pronounce both syllables.  It’s also “the single thing that readers of the letter-writing variety complain about most.”  As I read this piece about it, I kept waiting for Mary Norris to announce that they’d finally decided to change their style.  But apparently the diaeresis lives on.  What do you think, is the diaeresis annoying or endearing?  (I like it.)  Diaeresis.

16 Comments

  1. April 27th, 2012 / 8:05 pm mimi—

      i don’t like the word ‘diaeresis’  

      it is totally intimidating  

      especially on a friday night  

      at the end of a long week  

      but that’s just me  

  2. April 27th, 2012 / 8:25 pm postitbreakup—

      yeah i don’t wanna think about diarrheses until monday morning when i have to

  3. April 27th, 2012 / 8:29 pm postitbreakup—

      diaereses: diarrhea of the special characters menu you stumbled onto in word & now want to use as revenge for the editor rejecting your idea to dot all the i’s with little hearts

  4. April 27th, 2012 / 9:26 pm Shannon—

      I’ve never seen that word before and I’m currently intrigued about it. I’ve always called that punctuation an umlaut. When used with Germanic words I am pro umlaut. If it’s not a German or Germanic word..screw that diaereses. 

  5. April 27th, 2012 / 11:48 pm Brooks Sterritt—

      I like the symbol and its obsolescence (and the vowel-heavy word). “Die heiresses” is a nice mnemonic.

  6. April 28th, 2012 / 11:48 am deadgod—

      vacuum the continuum

  7. April 28th, 2012 / 12:27 pm Frank Tas, the Raptor—

      I like that! I’ve always wanted to bring back use of “whence”. DID YOU KNOW whence means “from where” so that saying “from whence” is redundant??

  8. April 28th, 2012 / 12:37 pm mimi—

      Whence did you learn this?

  9. April 28th, 2012 / 12:39 pm Trey—

      longtime htmlgiant readers may have learned this from a david foster wallace grammar quiz: http://htmlgiant.com/craft-notes/grammar-challenge/

      which you might be interested in if you’re interested in words like whence and stuff. or maybe not. just trying to be neighborly.

  10. April 28th, 2012 / 12:39 pm Frank Tas, the Raptor—

       Whence-ster’s Dictionary!

  11. April 28th, 2012 / 12:40 pm Frank Tas, the Raptor—

      Thanks, neighbor! I’ll give it a look-see.

  12. April 28th, 2012 / 1:43 pm Eric Beeson—

      I like diacritic marks. They make English look foreign. Naïve. Coöperation. Façade.
      And they make for good names. Chloë. Noël. The Brontës.

      Also, curious: Are there any other modern IE languages besides English that have basically eliminated diacritics?

  13. April 28th, 2012 / 2:53 pm leapsloth14—

      I like the word, Diaeresis.

  14. April 28th, 2012 / 3:40 pm alex crowley—

      we should have more diacritic marks in English, they’re great

  15. April 29th, 2012 / 3:02 am postitbreakup—

      commie

  16. April 29th, 2012 / 2:14 pm Richard Grayson—

      Microsoft Word automatically adds it when you type “naive.”