101 YEARS OLD AND STILL ACCENTUATING ACCENTS...

THIS week’s appeal is on behalf of NoZoChlo, the campaign to put diaereses back into the names that need them. Over the past few years, the number of people named Noël, Zoë or Chloë who have been leaving the diaeresis off the letter e in their names has increased alarmingly. According to the latest figures, more than half the Noëls, Zoës and Chloës in the land now leave this valuable diacritic out of their names.

The reasons they give for this are perfectly understandable: some don’t know where to find the letter on a keyboard; some think that diaeresis sounds like a gastro-intestinal disorder; others think the two dots look like an umlaut and make them look German. Yet a diaeresis is one of the last surviving British diacritics and leaving it off a name runs the risk of causing pronunciational horrors, reducing the bisyllabic Zoë or Chloë to a feebly monosyllabic Zo or Chlo.

Research by the Office of the Apostropher Royal has unearthed an alarming increase in recent years of gangs of German grammatical felons who have been collecting dropped diaereses and smuggling them to Germany where they are sold cheaper than umlauts. Only a trained eye can detect the difference (the dots on a diaeresis are 5.6 per cent closer together than on an umlaut) and the Germans think they are getting a bargain. Before our nation runs out of these accents altogether, we need urgent action and NoZoChlo has a three-point plan:

Education: to restore the pride of Noëls, Zoës and Chloës in the heritage they hold in their names and to emphasise the essential difference between an umlaut (which alters the pronunciation of a single vowel) and a diaeresis (which indicates that two vowels must be pronounced separately rather than joining forces to produce one sound (as in naïve, compared with, for example, maize).

Typing skills: to teach people the keyboard skills necessary to create a diaeresis of their own, or at least to copy and paste the vowels when needed from a piece such as this.

Brexit: to ensure that any trade deal with Germany prevents them from using purloined accents of this type as illicit umlauts. The Office of the Apostropher Royal has already pledged support for Interpol in its efforts to ensure diacritical purity in this matter.

We will however require a two-year transition period to cope with the shortfall in British diaereses, by creating fakes of our own from the over-supply of semi-colons resulting from the Apostropher Royal’s recent highly successful campaign of semicolonic irrigation.

It costs only 4.7p to put two semicolons into the Small Colon Collider at Cerne Abbas and smash them into each other to create one colon which can then be lifted and rotated through 90 degrees to form an umlaut-like accent. That accent may then be used as a diaeresis or, even better, sold to the Germans to buy back our own beloved diaereses. And the Noëls, Zoës and Chloës will once again be able to sleep in nominal, bisyllabic security.