Theme
4:38am May 28, 2015

I don’t know why this is.

And I usually try not to show my aggravation, because I don’t like telling people how to write or spell words or what words to use.

But I get angry, unreasonably angry perhaps, whenever I see people writing words in English like:

  • rôle (where most people would say role)
  • coöperation (where most people would say cooperation)

And yet I often write naive as naïve and naivete as naîveté, so maybe I’m being hypocritical here.  (I spell naive either way, but I can’t read naivete without mispronouncing it, so I put the accent on the end so my brain will parse it as “nah-EE-ve-TAY” and not “nah-ee-VETT”.

But when I read the word rôle, my brain automatically wants to pronounce it in French, which completely trips me up when reading English.

And I always get this feeling, when encountering someone who spells role and cooperation and other very common English words, with accent marks on top, like the person thinks they’re better than me, and I have no idea where that comes from because it’s probably not true.  And I know they probably have just as strong a compulsion to spell it that way as I have a compulsion against their spelling, so there’s really no winning.

And I’m not normally the sort of person who says “You shouldn’t use these words” or “You have to spell things the way I do” or even “Standardized spelling makes sense”.  So I don’t know why I have these intense preferences against accent marks in most English words.  But I do.  It’s sort of like misophonia only for written words.