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Comment by hinoki | Hacker News Reader

Here’s another New Yorker article to explain :)

TL;DR: it was an arbitrary decision from long ago that they stick to despite getting many letters of complaint.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

> Basically, we have three options for these kinds of words: “cooperate,” “co-operate,” and “coöperate.” Back when the magazine was just getting started, someone decided that the first misread and the second was ridiculous, and adopted the diaeresis as the most elegant solution with the broadest application. The diaeresis is the single thing that readers of the letter-writing variety complain about most.

Personally I use a diaeresis as well. Not very hard on an Apple device: press-and-hole "o", wait for the pop-up, press 2.

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

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I thought it was kind of funny they wrote élitism, as the inclusion of the accent made the sentence itself feel vaguely elitist.

I'm particularly fond of naïve, it's just an attractive spelling of the word, one which draws out the unusual stress which marks it as distinctive.

> The diaeresis is the single thing that readers of the letter-writing variety complain about most.

There's a poster on a message board i read who always uses the archaic letter thorn for 'th' (þink of writing someþing like þis). Whatever a comment is about, 70% of the replies are criticising or questioning the use thorn instead.

Thorn isn't archaic in Icelandic. þink of the Alþing.

Wouldn’t it be þink and ðis? I pronounce the th in “this” as voiced.

If it's the thing readers complain about the most, and it hasn't entered wider use in the last 40+ years, then it was a bad decision. If your style distracts the audience from what you're trying to say, you should change your style.

Interesting, 'most elegant solution with the broadest application', I have never seen it anywhere, but it sounds like at the time at least it was (perhaps in America specifically?) relatively popular?

I don't think so - by "broadest application" they mean "most generic" or "capable of being applied to the most cases" rather than "actually applied to the most cases".

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