I’ve posted about “résumé” (that’s Alt+130) before. To me, “resume” is pronounced “ri-ZYOOM” and means “pick up where you left off”. It causes a mental stumbling block that is easily avoided by using two little accents. Even just one little accent, on the final “e”, if you’re lazy.
Of course, in the UK we use “CV”, although no doubt the US word will be enforced upon us sooner or later, as employers read through their American management manuals…
I agree that we don’t really need them on things like “cafe” and “facade”, because there is no homonym to cause confusion.
Well, resume might mean you wanted to restart work, but résumé would mean you were handing in a summary of your experience. (That’s what the French translates to; “summarized”.)
In Windows, you can see the Alt+ combinations to type accents (and other special characters) by going to the Character Map. (Programs → Accessories → System Tools, or just Run… charmap). You can also set up a second keyboard, through the keyboard control panel – one for normal English typing, one in an international layout (or some specific country’s) for easy accented typing.
Shouldn’t that be “loose vocabulary.”? Or has English really stolen grammatical constructions from other languages?
[Aside from immigrants/ English second language-ers who continue to use grammar from their native tongues when speaking English. “English grammar I should use when Yiddish I am used to? God forbid!”]
Quite the opposite. Dictionaries are constantly updated, to reflect the changes that occur in language. They aren’t a rulebook. Otherwise language would never change or evolve - if we only ever obeyed what the previous edition of a dictionary told use, for example, laser would still be the acronym LASER, and not have become a word in its own right.
Pssst, GorillaMan . . . If you’re going to use a dash to separate thoughts in a sentence, it should be an em-dash (option-underscore on a Mac, and I won’t try for Windows) and there should be no spaces on either side of the dash: “Otherwise language would never change or evolve—if we only ever obeyed what the previous edition of a dictionary . . .”
Two en-dashes are also an acceptable substitute.
Or perhaps you feel you are on the cutting edge of the evolution of the language by using an en-dash with spaces around it. If so, carry on.
These are the only two alt codes I know from memory.
Two hyphens are also an acceptable substitute (as was the old typewriter convention. I mean, really, do you expect people to en- and em-dash their posts?)
Nahh, I just see no need to adopt all possible typographical conventions in non-typographic applications. And spaces either side of a dash are appropriate in electronic forms, to ensure there’s no ambiguity separation of words in the coding. (Plus, I’m sloppy with my grammar at the best of times …)
Depends on how many threads a day we want to see from people asking how to do all the special characters, and how many people want to keep repeating themselves over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
Given how much trouble we’ve got getting people to distinguish between it’s and its, your and you’re, I think this would be asking a bit much.
Therein lies a question: at what point does a common evolution or variation in language become the accepted norm? It depends on the arena in which it is being used. The more formal, the more pedantic the forum, the slower it will be to accept change. I suppose, given the comparative youth of the internet, it is not surprising that it is quicker to adopt newer spellings and drop redundant accents than equivalent established media. Oh well, plus ça change.
Oh, and just to establish that I am not a lexical diehard: thnx evry1, cu l8r!
I seem to recall that just after the forum was created, there was a discussion about this very issue. IIRC the response from the PTB was that they weren’t going to take the trouble to change it (said much more politely and diplomatically, of course).
Amen! One of the reasons the English language is so vastly superior to others is that we don’t have to worry about decorating our letters with all sorts of goofy extraneous marks. Which is bad enough if you’re writing by hand, but now that we’ve entered the computer age—hey, I don’t see any c-with-a-tail or e-with-a-stem on my keyboard! Just good, honest, English letters. If you wanna speckle your writing with all that fly shit, go write in French or something. This is America, dammit! If the 26 basic letters were good enough for… um… some great writer of the English language, they’re good enough for me.
It’s instructive to look at the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.
When AH first put out the dictionary in 1969, the editors asked a panel of 100+ noted writers, educators, and other supposed language “experts” for their opinions on whether certain usages were to be accepted in standard, good English. (Not necessarily the most pedantic formal English.) The resulting Usage Notes made the AH the dictionary of choice because an actual nuanced discussion of the usage gave far better guidance to acceptability than any mere definition or example.
But the real advantage of the panel is that it showed that no two supposed language “experts,” writers of good English, blessed exactly the same list of usages.
And as the editions piled up over time, the same usage would often come to be approved by higher percentages of the panel. I don’t know of a complete listing of the panel’s results, but this page has a number of examples.
And even better, the editors of the dictionary don’t let the panel’s opinions be the final word, as in their calling the disapprobation of “hopefully” a “grammatical shibboleth.”
As a 30-year veteran of professional writing, I am my own language expert. Whatever I write for publication contains correct usages by definition. By my definition, at any rate.
As long as everyone understands the limitations of approving of and objecting to particular usages, some standards can be set and opinions of others’ works can be made. Just beware the pedants who know that their lists are right and everybody else’s are wrong.
When it’s common, it’s the norm, it’s accepted, it’s not unusual or controversial. It therefore becomes embraced by the research of any decent dictionary. (And the reverse applies: if it loses favour, is no longer used, becomes so unfashionable as to be obsolete, the dictionary should also recognise that fact.)
…)