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This is how I get roped into these things. English is English. So now someone trying to give me the power to bind and loose.

Associated Press style does not use accent marks. Like much of AP style, that is not out of any reasoned cheap nhl jerseys china through principle. Their transmission system has simply been unable to produce them. This made things easy for copy editors, who did not have to know where to put accent marks in common words, and who were spared the burden of knowing where to put them in proper nouns instance, the orthographic nightmare of Czech.

But now, thanks to the version of Microsoft Word that we and many other newspapers use, it a simple matter: When resume comes up, just go to the top of the screen and click on Symbols, scroll through the charts of symbols until you locate the one with the properly accented lowercase e, click on that in two places, and resume editing. If the word occurs more than once in the text, you can always do search and replace.

Of course, you could switch to a setting that does use the accent marks, producing texts that put an accented e in cafe and decor and all manner of other words cheap jerseys that have been anglicized since Fowler was a little boy. Then, of course, a copy editor has to go through and substitute unaccented letters to keep the publication from looking precious.

All this, along with the formatting for online and formatting for print, adds to the purely mechanical tasks that must be performed and which take away time that could be used for editing, for working to establish accuracy and clarity.

As for resume, it is awkward that there is a completely different word with the same spelling, but the sense is almost always clear in context; I do think that adding the accent marks looks a little fussy. There are, however, less common words from French and Spanish that turn up and probably ought to have accent marks.

So here the ruling. Go to whatever dictionary is the basis for your house style. If it shows words adopted from foreign languages with accent marks, use them.

Unless you decide not to.

And now for something completely different: The word of the week is mephitic.

Matthew 18:18, for you heathens who miss allusions because your parents allowed you to stay home from church.

And don tell me how damn easy these functions are, thanks to the miracle of modern computerized text editing. They still additional mechanical tasks that add up cumulatively and distract people from more crucial concerns.

As a technical note, if one finds oneself using certain special characters often (such as or such) and if one is using Windows + a PC, it can be worthwhile to know how to insert these by using the number pad. With NumLock on, you hold down cheap authentic jerseys the Alt key and then type (on the number pad only) zero followed by the code for the character in question. For example, to get the umlauted , I typed Alt+0246. To get the accented , I typed Alt+0243, etc. A quick search of the web will produce lists of these characters.

I recently started using a “text expander,” that is, a utility that automatically inserts frequently used text strings when you type a specific bit of shorthand. (For example, I use it to insert my somewhat lengthy email address on web forms.) This one comes with a set of words that it assumes people misspell frequently, and it will automatically “fix” them for you, and some of those “fixes” are to include those precious little accent marks in some words, like in rsum.

I used the scare quotes around “fix” because I’m not to pleased with some of its fixes. For example, it assumes I mean “ros” when I type “rose.” Yeah, I never refer to the flower; always to the wine.

“And don’t tell me how damn easy these functions are, thanks to the miracle of modern computerized text editing. They’re still additional mechanical tasks that add up cumulatively and distract people from more crucial concerns.”

Then again, so is verifying spelling with a dictionary (and I don’t mean the built in “dictionaries” in Word et al.). The central question is how much potential accuracy we are willing to let deteriorate for the sake of a small amount of time saved if speed is of the essence, then accent free writing is fine, but otherwise it would be best to take the extra step.

You can also install a different (software) keyboard that lets you type accented characters fairly easily. For example, on my keyboard, AltGr+: followed by o gives me , and AltGr+ followed by e gives me . Many other characters are available directly with AltGr, such as AltGr+a for , AltGr+2 for (superscript 2) and AltGr+c for .

(AltGr is the right side Alt key; whether it is labeled “AltGr” or just “Alt” doesn’t matter. If anyone wants this keyboard, which is for Windows, contact me at cowan at ccil dot org and I’ll tell you where to get it from.)

But not for long, I’ll bet, since it was in what was clearly a verb slot in the larger sentence (scroll through the charts of symbols until you locate the one with the properly accented lowercase e, click on that in two places, and resume editing.) That’s not really a spot where it’s ambiguous.

English has a blue million words that might be nouns or verbs and a lot where the polysemy is so wide that even narrowing it to a verb (or noun) doesn’t help unless you look at context. One example: bank. edge of water/place where you keep your cheap jerseys money/kind of pool shot/putting your money somewhere? “Round” is five different parts of speech.

Diacritics are very nice, and I hate it when they’re left off names, but let’s not pretend we have to have them to tell nouns from verbs.

Picky, this is exactly what I find interesting about this discussion: how do we know when a word becomes English rather than “still French” or still anything else? Why is navet not English, while the other forms you list are?

Resume, for instance since English doesn’t use diacriticals, I tend to think that once a word has passed into English it loses its squiggles, wherever they (or it) originated. And since resume seems to me a perfectly English word borrowed from French, sure, but what word in English isn’t borrowed from somewhere? I would leave its es naked. But what makes me so certain that resume is English, and Picky so certain that naivete is not?

Anyone care to propose a distinction?

First, I don’t see why there is or should be any firm rule: acceptance of a word into the language will take time, and it will be a matter of personal judgement when it has crossed the line. My view is that navet is still the other side of the line, and has probably been kept there by the invention of the fully englished form “naivety”. (Of course I understand a style book will want to take a stand on the matter one way or the other.)

In English Canada most anglicized words tend to have the accents dropped by now, but because there are so many national figures with French names, a certain amount of flexibility is warranted. When the prime minister’s name has an accent, other ones seem more acceptable as well. It does vary a great deal by paper and community, however.Articles Connexes：