So this is the sort of thing that I'd share with my mother

[conuly]

Except that she inconsiderately and inconveniently has shuffled off this mortal coil without a forwarding address. Doesn't answer her calls much anymore either.

I tried to share it with my sister instead, and she tried, but....

Anyway! Now I'm sharing it with you! This is the sort of thing Mommy would've eaten up.

Ahem. One New Yorker writer has shared that we almost avoided decades of diaereses:

Lu Burke used to pester the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been at the magazine since 1928, to get rid of the diaeresis. Like Mr. Hyphen, Lu was a modern independent-minded reader, and she didn’t need to have her vowels micromanaged. Once, in the elevator, Weekes seemed to be weakening. He told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.

This was in 1978. No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.

I got it from this comment on this post at Metafilter.

Jenn did share with me the article she wanted to share with our mother today but couldn't do so for the aforementioned reason: Everyone needs an editor. Lyft just learned it the hard way.

Comments

[ioplokon]

The most viscerally obnoxious The New Yorker affectation is "premièred".

[conuly]

I'd normally put my money on "teen-ager", but you're right, that beats all for pure pretentiousness.

[hilarita]

I have to say that of:
co-operation
cooperation
and coöperation
I prefer the first, slightly dislike the second because I have a slight tendency to read it as coop-eration and then have to re-hyphenate, and really dislike the third because you could have used a goddam hyphen.

[conuly]

Not a fan of the diaresis?

[silveradept]

It is interesting that sine we have given so much of our lives over to automation, we get situations where typographical errors or putting the right numbers in the wrong places causes immense havoc. I believe there was a situation some time ago where someone miskeyed their buy order to be 1,000,000,000 rather than 1,000,000 and they had to halt trading and back out the changes for the day because the single missed stroke had tripped so many algorithms that the market crunched entirely based on all of the automatic maneuvers. So, yes, it's easy to issue corrections and make sure that accurate information gets out, it seems like even the fastest of error-correction procedures still can't beat computers that are reacting at their own speeds.

As for diaeresis, they're not particularly in use and tend to show up in words that generally do not have some other similar spelling and different meaning, so at this point they seem to be more ornament than useful item.