content warning: Zack Davis. so of course this is merely the intro to Zack’s unquenchable outrage at Yudkowsky using the pronouns that someone wants to be called by
content warning: Zack Davis. so of course this is merely the intro to Zack’s unquenchable outrage at Yudkowsky using the pronouns that someone wants to be called by
I don’t believe this is a correct use of a diaeresis: “preöccupied” (and not just because it looks ridiculous if you know Swedish)
Eschewing the mainstream use of language and formatting is a sign of genius.
Bring back röckdöts!
(Funniest example of that is the band Tröjan, which literally means “the sweater” in Swedish)
If you thought English was French it would phonetically read something like “pruhccupied” without it, or even more phonetically “prëccupied” (using, funnily enough, the same dots but as in Albanian orthography, which happen to capture the sound quite well). Does this only raise further questions? Well yes.
Whomst’ve even come up with such a preposterous usage
The New Yorker diaeresis of great pretentiousness (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis) is much less cool than the heavy metal umlaut. Alas.
The diaeresis does have an actual grammatical purpose: to break up digraphs into their separate sounds, indicating, for example, that the “oo” in “cooperate” isn’t a single vowel like the one in “loop”. Though given that English doesn’t have an “eo” digraph that produces one vowel sound, “preöccupied” is just ignorant peacockery.
The Heavy Metal Umlaut, meanwhile, stands outside of grammar and doesn’t care for it. To challenge it because “Moteurhead” sounds like a silly name for a metal band is to miss the point.
Cooperate as in turn someone into a barrel maker.