From the quite interesting New Yorker profile of Michelle Bachmann:
The only senior member of the team not making the trip was Ed Rollins, Bachmann’s campaign manager. Rollins is famous in Washington for two things: managing Ronald Reagan’s successful reëlection campaign against Walter Mondale in 1984, and developing poisonous relationships with most of his high-profile employers since then. They have included George H. W. Bush (“the worst campaigner to actually get elected President,” according to Rollins), Ross Perot (“a paranoid lunatic on an ego trip”), and Arianna Huffington (“the most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I’d met in thirty years in national politics”). More recently, he has managed the campaign of Mike Huckabee, appeared frequently on CNN, and worked in corporate public relations.
Riddle me this, New Yorker editors: “reëlection”. What’s with the umlaut? It seems as though the en dash somehow fell out of favor between your use of phrases like “front-runner” and “cable-news” in your lede and your author’s opening paragraph, and a time when nearly every other English language publication in the world would have written “re-election.” Indeed looking at that opener, I wouldn’t have en dashed “cable news” at all because cable news is not so terribly unusual anymore and what’s more, I wouldn’t even call the kinds of shows that Bachmann gained notoriety on “news” at all so much as “commentary” shows.
I think it’s pretty much only The New Yorker that uses umlauts this way. Maybe Strunk and White have an opinion on this. But my opinion is that style ought to be, above all other things, clear. Most people are unfamiliar with the use of umlauts (or circumflexes or other diareses) in written English, and for that reason alone they should be avoided.
It’s because Bachmann is Heavy Metal.
Only if she picks a running mate named Turner.
At least they didn’t use a haboob metaphor.
In English, that particular diacritic is called a diaeresis. Indicates when the second of a pair of vowels is pronounced separately rather than forming a diphthong with the prior vowel. It’s common enough in certain words (as in naïve), a little more eccentric in coördinate or reëlection.
Oh, and having now read through to the end of the post, I think you were confusing “diacritic” and “diaresis”. Anyway, it does seem a little pretentious in certain words, but is it really so unfamiliar? I learned about this in middle school English. Granted that that was 25 years ago — perhaps our schools have declined so much that this important lesson has fallen by the wayside.
Thanks for the corrections. I did not learn about these in middle school English, and it sounds as though you are younger than I if middle school was only 25 years ago (for me it’s now closer to 30).
Actually I realized after I posted that that I did the math wrong, but I was in no hurry to issue a correction. Middle school was 30+ years ago for me.
I’m torn. On the one hand, this is entirely logical. On the other hand, it’s not unlike Americans who put the u in colour. I dislike by instinct.
I put the “u” in colour. Also behaviour. A couple others. My spell check always bitches at me about it.
This comes from reading a lot of books written in the King’s version of English as a youth.
Here’s my stylistic rule of thumb:
If I have go onto the Apple online help page to research what I need to do to make a kind of seldom used punctuation even appear above a letter, it’s just not going to happen.
This rule lacks the authority or panache of a Strunk & White rule, but it works for me.
I’ve seen this before, mostly in early 20th-century writing, I think.
Also, the en dash is distinct from and slightly longer than a hyphen, and is generally used to indicate ranges of values. Compound words like “front-runner” use a hyphen. Actually, I would just write “frontrunner,” but I could be wrong about that.
The New Yorker is known for its use of the umlaut in such words. It’s a dowdy little element of New Yorker style.
It’s really a hyphen, not an en dash, in those compounds, isn’t it? Merriam-Webster gives front-runner as the standard spelling. Cable-news is hyphenated in the article because it’s a phrasal adjective. (What kind of Pasionara? A cable-news Pasionara.)
Oops — messed up the link.
Merriam-Webster gives front-runner as the standard spelling. Cable-news is hyphenated in the article because it’s a phrasal adjective. (What kind of Pasionara? A cable-news Pasionara.)
I get it. As in “What kind of grammatical pretentiousness is this?” “Gratutitous grammatical pretentiousness.”
Write to be understood.
That’s not pretentious. Noting that the diacritic is actually called a trema is pretentious.
What is pretentious about hyphenating a phrasal-adjective? Doing so adds clarity and can prevent misreading. Take a look at Garner’s Modern American Usage, 625-627, with 100+ examples.