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Comment by tdk | Hacker News Reader

OT, but it's annoying the way The New Yorker writes cooperation 'coöperation' (ditto 'reëlect'). There's zero justification for this, etymologically or orthographically, it's just pure pretension.

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Lol typical hacker news blowhard going off on something they have no idea about . "Orthographically" speaking there IS a justification and you would've found it if you spent three seconds of effort:

diaeresis ‎(plural diaereses)

1. (orthography) A diacritic ( ¨ ) placed over a vowel letter (especially the second of two consecutive ones) indicating that it is sounded separately, usually forming a distinct syllable, as in the English words naïve, Noël and Brontë, the French haïr and the Dutch ruïne.

It makes perfect sense to use the diacritic in this way and it is part of their style guide, has been for some time.

You couldn't even spend the time researching what you're complaining about. Talk about pretension.

Factually correct.

Still pretentious :-)

I'm well aware it's a diaeresis, and that it's part of their house style. That's exactly what I'm objecting to. The diaeresis is obsolete modern English (with rare exceptions) and putting it in interrupts the flow of reading. There is no excuse for it in 'cooperation', and only the only reason they do it is in order to show off they know about it - IOW pretension.

>There is no excuse for it in 'cooperation'

Yes, there is. A) it is a perfectly grammatically and orthographically correct usage of the di B) There is no prescriptive body which governs usage of American English - there's no need for an "excuse" to use an orthographic feature of the language as if it is some clause violated.

The reason they do it is because it's the New Yorker. It's their house style. It's what their readers expect and understand and it has become a tradition and perhaps even emblematic of the magazine and its brand. Complaining about the "pretentiousness" of the New Yorker is like complaining about the convoluted commands in eMacs or vim - it's not a problem, it's a feature.

Any deviation from the norms of English calls attention to itself, and distracts from the meaning. This can be done by great writers, but always with reason.

Good writing reveals something about the reader. Bad writing reveals something about the writer.

However since you now seem to agree that it's pretentious, which was my original point, I'll leave it there.

It's interesting how it does tend to be the second of two, because you never see it occur on thirds even where it "works", such as sequoïa, aqueöus, Hawaiiän, or Louïe.

It doesn't work in those, because the vowel marked does form a dipthong with the preceding vowel in two of them, and wouldn't ordinarily in the sequence of vowels in the other two.

well its the only English language broad sheet paper that finds it necessary. I agree with the previous answer it screams of pretension.

The New Yorker is a magazine, not a broadsheet paper. I suppose you might have confused it with the New York Times, but the Times doesn't use the style rule in question and so the claim would be untrue about that publication, as well.

I agree. And I say this with all due respect to tdk, unless you want to be a "typical Hacker News blowhard," don't make irrelevant critiques! It's this kind of stuff that gets me riled up about HN comments. This, and the classic "No. You're wrong..." brusque replies.

We get it, you don't like the style of the article (and you might not like the style of the New Yorker), but why does that matter? The article used paragraphs, was free of grammatical errors, and was highly readable.

This was why I flagged it 'OT', which means "Off Topic", i.e. irrelevant.

Different forums have different conventions, and judging by the downvotes even flagged OT is not OK here. I've learned my lesson.

There is a fair bit of background with the diaeresis at the New Yorker [0].

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-t...

Those "pretentious" dots are the difference between a chicken coop and a worker coöp. They're to completely different words, and the spelling makes this clear.

I'm anti-snob but I do like it when publications write "résumé" instead of "resume" for a job seeker's summary.

Those extra accent marks make it much more readable. Without them, I always mentally pronounce "employe resume" as "employee rezoom" and then backtrack to correct myself to pronounce it as "employee rayzoomay".

True, however cooperation and coöperation are not.

Maybe the first instance of chicken recooperation?

The comments below explain a bit of the reasoning, but I agree. In cases where there is no alternative meaning to the word, this makes for a confusing read, especially since ö is a letter with a completely different sound in several European languages (German, and I think Norwegian and Danish, and my local dialect of Slovenian :P), pronounced as "oe"

If you want to imagine how I read a word like that, this video is a helpful guide to pronounciation of ö: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr-mCMtISfA

Must be even worse since ö had different pronunciations in different languages.

Oh it's total pretension, but there _is_ justification for this. The diaeresis separates out the second vowel. It's pronounced not "rehlect" but "re-elect".

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