It’s a poor writer who needs double dots and little squiggles — but tittles are fine

By Steve Finan

January 19 2020, 6:00pm

I don’t like and don’t use diacritics. Further, I don’t think any should be used, by anyone, when writing in English.

I am aware, before you tell me, that a lot of people would disagree about that.

Diacritics are the little arches, double dots and squiggles that go over or under letters in loanwords we have imported into English from other languages. Cafe, for instance, came from French and they use an acute over the top of the e.

And words like naive, also from the French, had a diaeresis, also known as an umlaut, a double dot above the i. Quite a few words in German carry an umlaut, almost always over vowels.

I am annoyed when word processing software, such as Microsoft’s Word, autocorrects me and inserts these marks into whatever I’m typing.

I can see the reason these marks are used, of course. They help with pronunciation. “Resume”, when referring to a history of your working life (also known as a curriculum vitae) ends with an “ay” sound. But without the diacritic looks very like “resume” (to take up where you left off).

“Pate” (the meat paste-like product), again with a pronounced “ay” on the end, looks like the “pate” that refers to your head.

But let me point to the celebrated, and very English, Charlotte Bronte (and her sisters) who have a two-syllable name with the double dot above their e. The story goes that their father’s birth name was Brunty, but he pretentiously adopted a more exotic name. You’d have to agree that “the Brunty sisters” doesn’t sound so classic author-like.

And that is the way I regard people who use these diacritical marks: their umlauts, circumflexes, macrons and cedillas. They are being pretentious. If whatever you are writing is so badly worded that the reader might think you meant “work history” instead of “keep going” then re-word your sentence.

You might argue that English uses diacritical marks. Aren’t the dots over a lower-case i and j just such things? The name for that little dot is a tittle. Technically, tittles are diacritics, but are so well-established in English as to be accepted as part of our language. No one could be accused of being pretentious for writing the letter i.

Anyway, the best part of stealing words from other languages is that they become part of our language. So we spell them our way. We don’t need diacritics.