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Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020)
Several weeks ago, the satirical viral content site Clickhole posted this article: “Going Rogue: ‘The New Yorker’ Has Announced That They’re Going To Start Putting An Umlaut Over Every Letter…
In Confessions of a Comma Queen, former New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris briefly recounts the rationale behind the magazine’s style choice (excerpted here on Merriam-Webster’s website): Basically, we have three options for these kinds of words: “cooperate,” “co-operate,” and “coöperate.” Back when the magazine was just developing its style, someone decided that the first could be misread and the second was ridiculous, and so adopted the third as the most elegant solution with the broadest application. Then they started writing that e above the o rather than after it to show that it was affecting the vowel but wasn’t really pronounced, and eventually this superscript e simplified to two short vertical strokes or two dots.† And thus the confusion between diaereses and umlauts was born.
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