LINGUISTICGRAVITY

The marks most English speakers cannot name

Accent Marks in English

One of the most visible differences between English and other Roman-alphabet languages (Spanish, French, German) is that English almost never uses accent marks. The few that do appear are borrowed wholesale from foreign languages, and most English speakers cannot even name them. The acute accent (the small rightward slash) shows up in words lifted from French: cafe, resume, risque, blase, touche, fiance, and of course Beyonce. The umlaut or diaeresis (two dots above a vowel) is rarer still: doppelganger and uber carry it from German, and the name Zoe sometimes takes one over the final E, though many simply spell it Z-O-E-Y instead.

The cedilla (the curly tail under a C) appears only in facade. The circumflex (the small triangle hat) survives only in chateau. The tilde (the wavy line) lives in pinata and jalapeno, both from Spanish. And then there is one of the stranger cultural footnotes in English typography: the "metal umlaut," the practice of putting pointless dots over letters in band names to make them look more Germanic and aggressive. Motorhead, Motley Crue, and Blue Oyster Cult all did this, riding the assumption that German and Scandinavian rock bands were tougher.

Dropping accent marks in informal English is perfectly acceptable, and almost nobody will consider it an error to write cafe instead of cafe with an accent. The only real exceptions are words where the accent distinguishes two different meanings: expose (the verb, to reveal) and expose (the noun, an investigative report) would be genuinely confusing without the mark.

Why ships and countries are sometimes 'she'

Gendered Pronouns for Objects

Unlike French, German, or Spanish, English does not assign grammatical gender to inanimate objects. There is no masculine pencil or feminine table. But a small, specific category of things has historically been referred to using feminine pronouns: ships and large vehicles, certain forms of heavy artillery, countries, the concept of the Church (particularly the Catholic Church as a spiritual institution), and some abstract concepts like nature, justice, and destiny. This was never a grammatical requirement. Using "it" and "its" for any of these things has always been correct. Feminine pronouns were a cultural custom, a way of signaling affection, reverence, or protectiveness.

In contemporary English, this custom is fading. Because English is a non-gendered language, every deliberate use of she/her for an object is an explicit choice, and that choice now reads as an affectation. Margaret Thatcher, discussing the sinking of an Argentine warship during the Falklands War, flip-flopped mid-interview between calling the ship "it" and "she," which illustrates how even a committed traditionalist finds the convention unnatural when speaking in real time. Using "it" comes unconsciously; saying "she" requires deliberate effort. In the Simpsons, Mr. Burns says "Nature started the fight for survival and now she wants to quit because she's losing," which the writers clearly intended as a signal of how archaic and aristocratic his speech patterns are.