06.28.08
Wörd!
I recall, in slightly fictionalized fashion, a book reviewer chastising a particular anal book of prescriptivistic grammar (”Split that infinitive and die, mongrel dog!”—though that’s perhaps being unfair in the mildness of my paraphrase). The reviewer’s complaint was that said prescriptivist had failed at his own stated level of prescriptivism in using an unaccented E in cliche. The dullard! Without the accent, we’d all be pronouncing it “clitch!” Or some such nonsense that I’m exaggerating. Maybe. This incident seemed to me to be something of the wits chucking nits at each other in wit-nitted battle.
In general, English is strongly accepting of original spelling of its adopted loanwords: rendezvous is my typical example. English isn’t so quick to retain unusual characters like the cedilla (in françois, literally and by way of illustration), the tilde (not your great aunt’s middle name, but the swoopy symbol in mañana and the target of a Nike swoop-infringement suit), or the umlaut (the two dots orbiting the proper name Schröder like Deimos and Phobos, but not like Deimös and Phöbös).
Abandoning such non-English conventions is just fine with me, as I’m a strong believer in the fact that we don’t speak non-English when speaking English—and that applies to the written version, as well. So when the persnickitors (including the automated persnickitor in Microsoft Word) start harrumphing that cliche is a misspelling, I return the harrumph. Is that naive of me?, I ask as I see the persnickitors twitch. You’re not naive! You’re naïve!
Well, maybe I’m both, but I’m also aware of not only the lack of necessity but also the problems of trying to cling to what is for us unusual character sets. Quick, run to your typewriter and find the two-dots-above-the-I key. Not right in front of you? Not in front of me, and in fact I had to turn to a special text-editing program to get access to ANSI character 239(EF). Intuitive, eh?
And then there’s this I spotted on the web:
Depending on HTML code and web browsers to properly interpret some of these character sets is neither naive nor naïve—it is ny-eeeee! I find juvenile pleasure in knowing that the symbol signals “phonological diaeresis.”
Equally quickly, without looking, which way do the accents go on the noun resume: résumè, rèsumé, rësumê, rèçumæ?
I’m certainly not the first writer to campaign for dispensing with foreign characters. Here’s Woody Allen, tongue-in-cheek, of course, in a piece called “Lovborg’s Women Considered” in Without Feathers:
Born in Stockholm in 1836, Lovborg (originally Lövborg, until, in later years, he removed the two dots from above the o and placed them over his eyebrows) began writing plays at the age of fourteen.
There are other good uses for such now-obsolute typographical gymnastics. Here’s Steve Martin, following the lead of the fictional Mr. Lovborg, writing about a supposed shortage of typographical periods in the font style known as Times Roman:
“Most vulnerable are writers who work in short, choppy sentences,” said a spokesperson for Times Roman, who continued, “We are trying to remedy the situation and have suggested alternatives, like umlauts, since we have plenty of umlauts—and, in fact, have more umlauts than we could possibly use in a lifetime! Don’t forget, umlauts can really spice up a page with their delicate symmetry—resting often midway in a word, letters spilling on either side—and not only indicate the pronunciation of a word but also contribute to a writer’s greater glory because they’re fancy, not to mention that they even look like periods, indeed, are indistinguishable from periods, and will lead casual readers to believe that the article actually contains periods!”
Ö!
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and 
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