Special Characters

A. Generally, we leave such things to the dictionary. Our main arbiter in matters of spelling—Webster’s eleventh—tends to preserve diacritics in words that are direct imports, especially when they are essential to pronunciation. So write appliqué, which happens to be the only option given in Webster’s. In the case of decor, the accent isn’t absolutely essential to pronunciation; that may be the reason Webster’s allows either decor or décor.

In any case, it is not true that English is without accents. I would guess that accents were often dropped in published material many years ago because of the extra difficulty of typesetting them—especially in the case of a word like façade (Webster’s prefers facade but allows façade; American Heritage prefers façade but allows facade). On that basis, I would guess that in the future, accents will become more rather than less common in English.

A. Typographer’s marks are superior, though they are not always easy to implement. The unidirectional straight-up-and-down marks signal a technological limitation of one or another sort. Most typewriter manufacturers chose to include only one key for quotation marks and apostrophes, and most keyboard makers followed suit. The result has been that most people depend on software to generate the proper mark, and software isn’t foolproof (despite what one term for typographer’s quotation marks, “smart quotes,” might imply). If you want, for example, an apostrophe rather than an opening single quotation mark at the beginning of a string (e.g., the apostrophe before the n in “rock ’n’ roll”), you must tell the computer that that’s what you want. Word processors usually have a built-in keystroke combination that results in an apostrophe (’) regardless of the position of the cursor relative to other text. In the 1980s and early ’90s, software for the average user was a little less sophisticated than it is now, and word processors tended to ship without defaulting to typographer’s quotation marks. This only encouraged the infiltration of “dumb quotes” into the heretofore professionally typeset world of media like television and magazine advertisements, now often created on the desktop by software available to professionals and laypersons alike. And today, with the proliferation of the Internet, we are practically back to square one. On this site we use directional marks that will display correctly in most browsers; this approach is not, however, that easy to implement in HTML. Straight-up-and-down marks are still, for reasons of technological expediency, the majority on the Internet.

That’s a long way of saying that the unidirectional marks are a compromise and therefore inferior to the typographer’s marks. If you’ve got the technology, flaunt it.

A. For manuscripts, inserting an ellipsis character is a workable method, but it is not our preferred method. It is easy enough for a publisher to search for this unique character and replace it with the recommended three periods plus two nonbreaking spaces (. . .). But in addition to this extra step, there is also the potential for character-mapping problems (the ellipsis could appear as some other character) across software platforms—an added inconvenience. So type three spaced dots, like this . . . or, at the end of a grammatical sentence, like this. . . . If you know how, use two nonbreaking spaces to keep the three dots—or the last three of four—from breaking across a line.

A. The tendency to dispense with accents on capital letters does vary across languages. It is a common practice, for example, in French and Portuguese, less so in Italian and Spanish. This is at least partly a function of the larger number of accents in French and in Portuguese—not just more accents but more capitalized letters that would take an accent. Reasons for dropping accents from capital letters have ranged from the difficulty of employing such letters in older typesetting environments to the disputed role of accents in the modern world. Even today, the awkwardness of achieving them on computer keyboards—especially those whose default is English—continues to undermine their use. But this difficulty has become increasingly minor with advances in software applications—it’s barely an inconvenience, really—and there are fewer excuses not to use accents on capital letters as necessary. In sum, it’s best to use them. The Académie française, by the way, has issued a nice statement of policy in support of accents on capital letters that could apply to other languages (see “Accentuation des majuscules” at http://www.academie-francaise.fr/langue/questions.html#accentuation ; note that accents are not used in URLs).

A. Works published in English often omit accents on foreign words, mainly for ease of typesetting and proofreading (since editors are often unable to proofread in the second language). It’s an accepted publishing practice, although I’m sure many editors feel as you do that it doesn’t do justice to the foreign language. In scholarly works, the accents should be retained, and the author and editor should understand ahead of time who will be responsible for checking them in proof. The name of a country, however, should take the form familiar to English speakers (see CMOS 14.137)—in this case, Mexico rather than México.

A. Use it until just before it becomes annoying. (You get to decide when that is.) See CMOS 6.103–10 for more on the slash.

A. How many dots would you like? You can have as many as four if you put an ellipsis after a period. I don’t know of any significance behind the choice of three. Perhaps the number gradually came to be popular and then was standardized in style sheets and grammar for the sake of consistency, as well as to prevent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . silliness.

A. Apostrophes come in only one shape, which happens to be the same as that of the single end quotation mark. In word-processed documents, however, when apostrophes are preceded by a space (as opposed to those in the middle of a word, like “it’s”), the software thinks the writer wants an opening quotation mark and supplies one. When documents aren’t proofread carefully, these marks appear in place of apostrophes. (This is only one reason why I’m not worried about being replaced by a computer anytime soon.)

A. Although there isn’t a steady demand for masked expletives in scholarly prose, this is weirdly one of our frequently asked questions. (I have to wonder who is reading the Q&A—and what they are writing.) The symbols are fine for cartoons and e-mail messages, where you may arrange them in whatever order pleases you. In formal prose, however, we find that a 2-em dash makes a d——d fine replacement device.

A. This is exactly what style manuals were invented for: so that editors can impose consistency as they read without stopping to ponder each issue as it arises. Style manuals also tend to be based on long-term observation of style trends, so that consulting a manual can save an editor from an embarrassing departure from convention. Rather than let whichever author comes first in the book dictate the style (do I hear a collective gasp?), check a manual like CMOS and find that footnote superscripts are normally set in roman type and mathematical variables are set in italics.