Accents Wild

BEING a diacritic critic is a more lonesome business than being the last great auk, or Alexander Selkirk, because both of those uniquities had, at least, the comfort of remembering the time when they were not unique, — and Alexander also lived in momentary expectation of being restored to a world much overstocked with humanity, — while the diacritic critic monopolizes in his unlucky person the diacritical criticalness of the universe from the beginning to the end of time. Hence I compare my feelings to those of the phœnix, who has heretofore been regarded as not only sui generis, but as the only genuine example of sui-generisness on record. Thus it is said that the phœnix alone escapes love, because

Whether the diacritic critic enjoys a similar exemption owing to his inability to find a diacritically critical soulmate is a question into which it is unnecessary to enter here.

A diacritic critic, impatient reader, is a person — or, rather, the person — who is extremely sensitive about diacritical marks. As you are not one, you can have no conception of the state of my nerves. If I lived in England, or on the Continent, I should doubtless lead a more comfortable existence, — pending the time when both those regions become completely Americanized, — but I live in America; I read American books and journals; and I even consign impeccable literary compositions of my own to the machinations of the American printer. I shudder to say that I read two American newspapers daily, and were it not for a weekly antidote in the shape of the Times I should doubtless be in the hands of the alienists at this moment.

Let us begin with the newspapers. You, happy reader, appear to suffer only moderate and intermittent discomfort from them. You have never known anything better; they are an established national institution, like the sleeping car; hence you endure them with equanimity or magnanimity, as the case may be, and some of you would even have me believe that you are patriotically proud of them. You are not, of course, one of the fifty-odd million who batten on the pictorial imbecilities of the comic supplement; yet I venture to assert that you accept with perfect complacence the bungled proper names in the news columns, — unless one of these names chances to be your own, — and will pronounce me finicky for objecting to them.

I am finicky. That nobody else is, is a mystery with which I daily and hourly grapple. I take some comfort in the belief that just a few of the thorns in my flesh have occasionally scratched your own epidermis; but I wonder and repine that the quintessential sensibilities of a diacritic critic have been imposed by the gods upon no other mortal than myself. Hence the burden of my complaint — not that the time is out of joint, but that I alone, of all humanity, was born to the hopeless task of trying to set it right.

Reverting to the subject of names: my father’s name was misspelled on his tombstone. My own name is almost invariably misspelled; not only in the press, but by tradespeople, by professional colleagues, by bosom friends. If this essay ever gets into type I shall insist upon seeing the final proof-sheets, for the express purpose of assuring myself that the printer has not eked out the author’s surname, under the title, with a superfluous ɭ; and even then I shall expect to see the double ɭ crop up in the table of contents. I know those printers! In spite of impassioned appeals, annually renewed, my name was misspelled for ten years in the Washington city directory. It was recently misspelled, with an ο in place of the first a, in the Official Register of the United States, and consequently appeared several pages out of its proper place — a lost needle in the huge haystack of the government muster-roll.

All this is comparatively unimportant to myself, because I am still sure of my identity in spite of persistent misinformation on the subject from the rest of the world; but it is by no means unimportant that the identity of other people in whom I take an interest should be so frequently obscured by the botchery of printers and writers. I think it would be no exaggeration to say that personal names not generally familiar — in other words, the very names that deserve most careful treatment in order that readers may not be misled — stand about sixty chances in a hundred of being spelled correctly in a provincial American newspaper; and in this estimate I ignore errors consisting only in the omission of foreign diacritical marks — a subject to which I shall presently advert. In the New York papers the percentage of accuracy may run up to eighty or ninety, and most New York papers also reconcile the diacritic critic to mundane existence by retaining foreign accents — sometimes. Unhappily, however, the provincial standard of journalism falls even further below that of New York than does the New York standard below that of London; and I am one of the unfortunate millions who live in the provinces.

You do not care. If you did — vehemently enough — things would improve, for it is the cardinal principle of the newspaper editor to give the public what it wants, or what he thinks it wants.

The other day a German exploring expedition came to grief in Spitsbergen. It is unnecessary to cavil over the z with which our newsmen spell the name of this archipelago, because no uncertainty is thereby occasioned in the reader’s mind as to what locality is meant. Neither, for our present purpose, need we urge the gracelessness of the term ‘scientists,’ which was applied to the members of the expedition, — a word which, though invented in England, is hardly ever heard in that country, while it flourishes exceedingly in America. (Frankly, I am unable to explain myself why my gorge rises at this word; just as I cannot explain why I abhor the middle initial in ‘John T. Smith.’)

I am, however, quite clear as to my reasons for objecting to the way in which the names of the unlucky ‘ scientists’ above mentioned were presented in the American press. I wished to know who they were, and the newspapers, while pretending to tell me, did nothing of the sort; they might almost as well have manufactured the names on the spot (as they are said sometimes to manufacture news). Many papers unblushingly printed two or more spellings of a single name within a few lines of one another, and all of them wrong.

It is impossible to apportion the blame for such occurrences between the printers and the telegraphers, but even if it could be done, it would not lessen the culpability of the newspapers. It is quite within the power of the press associations to enforce accuracy in telegraphing, just as it is in the power of the individual publisher to enforce accurate printing, proof-reading, and editing in his own establishment. In the last analysis, you are to blame. You get whatever you insist on having, — whether it be three bathrooms in a ten-room house, or the rural free delivery of mail, — but you have not even begun to realize the iniquities (in more serious things than orthography) of your newspapers, just as you have not risen en masse and burned down the printing establishments that turn out antiquated atlases, claptrap encyclopædias, and French-English dictionaries lacking the word téléphone.

And so if Herr Rave freeze his toes at the North Pole, his agony is made more excruciating by the reflection that half the newspapers of America will mangle his name beyond recognition; the sympathy that is his due will be wasted on a figmentary Save, or Rove, or what-not.

The law affords no redress. The journalist who, from misadvertence, brands you for a felon when you are, in reality, compact of all the virtues, can be made to come down handsomely for his mistake; but he may take the most wanton liberties with your nameeven to calling you ‘Taylor’ when you are really ‘ Tailer ’ — with serene impunity. In other words, only your metaphorical good name is safe.

But if Rave is maltreated in the American newspapers, what of Schröder, or Mallarmé, or Benoît, or Plançon, or Carreño? What, indeed!

To the diacritic critic — and to him alone — it is a blood-curdling reflection that through the length and breadth of America, except only in the city of New York, the President of the French Republic is uniformly presented to newspaper readers as ‘Poincare’ — and nobody cares. On second thought, I have not stated the case quite accurately; about once in four times he is ‘Poincaire’; nor does this altogether exhaust the list of his aliases, as you may see from the following faithfully reproduced specimen of journalistic insouciance: —

Mother of Poincaire Dead

Special to THE BULLETIN by United Press.

Paris, April 11--Mme. Poincare, mother of President Poinciarre, of France, died this morning.

The omission of the diacritic is, however, universal. Even the English press of French New Orleans ignores it. The leading papers of New York City are curiously inconsistent; M. Poincaré gets his acute accent in the text — but in headings never. Obviously the typefonts used for headings lack diacritics, and this is true, also, of nearly all fonts used in the advertising columns. You will find ample evidence of this in the announcements of eating-houses. The incongruity of an establishment that proclaims French cookery while permitting itself to be called a ‘cafe’ is obvious.

Do not suppose that it is a question here merely of headings and advertisements printed in capitals. The D.C. is well aware that the suppression of accents pertaining to capital letters is tolerated (barely and rarely) in France itself. In the best New York newspapers, however, — those which are genuinely scholarly and fastidious about most of les riens qui sont tout,—not only are accents almost invariably omitted over capitals, but their use or omission over ‘ lower case ’ letters depends solely upon the size of the type! Surely it would be less illogical to use accents throughout on Tuesdays and Fridays and omit them throughout on the other days of the week.

Permit me, now, to record the only case in which the suppression of the diacritic has brought its own punishment, with, let us hope, a salutary effect upon the suppressers. The episode deserves a permanent place in the history of letters, and has not, to my knowledge, been noted by any one else.

Let us suppose that the reporter for an accentless and italicless newspaper wishes to mention a fête champêtre, or a bal masqué, or somebody’s début. Nothing could be easier. ‘Fete,’ and so forth, pass muster as readily as ‘blase’ or ‘fiance,’ to which most readers have become absolutely callous. In fact, if the accents appeared, they would be regarded as mere frippery by ninetynine hundredths of the public. But suppose our reporter wishes — as he has wished again and again during the past three years — to record that so-and-so was ‘among those present at the thé dansant.’ It can’t be done! Put this through the hopper of the typesetting machine, and it comes forth, ‘the the dansant,’ — which even Oshkosh finds intolerable. The thing was, however, often attempted when thés dansants came into fashion, and with various results. Generally the proof-reader eliminated one of the the’s, making dansant a quasi-noun, and to this day one reads of people giving or attending ‘dansants.’ Latterly the public taste seems to favor ‘ dansante,’ which doubtless has a Frenchier appearance, provided you are sufficiently ignorant of the Gallic tongue.

Two other solutions of the difficulty may be noted: —

that is, either a hyphen or quotation marks set off the exotic phrase. The most desperate remedy of all was that adopted by the Washington Post — a newspaper which once published the entire proceedings of an international scientific congress in accentless French! This journal, after struggling with the thé dansant problem for more than a year, actually bought a supply of acute accents. The first morning they appeared, the D.C. nearly expired with joy. Not only thé, but also attaché and chargé d’affaires are now scrupulously accented in the Post; but alas! the reform does not extend to proper names. The cognomen of the French president is still printed so as to rhyme with Gare Saint-Lazare, and not with (what the American newspaper man is when he tackles French) égaré. And the D.C. (in this case District of Columbia) does n’t care a rap!

Of all these orthographic enormities the suppression of the cedilla is undoubtedly the greatest. The present writer once publicly suggested ¹ that although the name Divorcons, which the newspapers and the billboards would have us believe is the title of a well-known French play, is certainly neither French, English, nor Swahili, it may be Chicagoese — since the second syllable rhymes nicely with ’pork.’ Apparently this flippant suggestion fell as flat as did, some years back, the French puns in that delightful opera Véronique, of which only the ‘Swing Song’ has survived in America. (My own lasting recollection of the opera is the stony silence that greeted the heroine’s description of her prospective stepmother as ‘pa’s encore.’)

Our observations on the subject of foreign accents, which contained the sparkling witticism just quoted, awoke no sympathetic response anywhere. Even the editor published them reluctantly, and in the next week’s issue permitted his printer to make us say something about the ‘ Academie Francaise’ — an institution that certainly was never heard of outside of these United States. Nevertheless, after more than four years of self-suppression, we summon up courage to repeat that we have small respect for Herr Müller, who repudiates his ancestry and becomes ‘Muller’ when he takes out naturalization papers in this country; that the contrast between the treatment of Max Müller’s name in England and Hugo Münsterberg’s in America is significant; and that, in the whole range of diacritical eccentricities, there is nothing so extraordinary as the way in which buffet is spelled over the doors of public houses in certain American cities. In Washington you may see ‘buffét,’ ‘buffèt,’ ‘buffêt,’ — and even ‘buffet’! — though Washington cafés are ‘cafes,’ nine times out of ten.

That these things happen is not half so remarkable as that they are accepted with cheerful acquiescence by everybody — except the unhappy scribe. Worse than acquiescence — not a soul notices them! Yet French and German are supposed to be taught in American schools.

I have done with the newspapers (for this morning). Their depravities would fill a library, until one wonders what is taught in so-called schools of journalism. But lest publishers of less ephemeral literature should be prematurely patting themselves on the back, let me hasten to say that our magazines and books are rapidly declining to the journalistic level.

The D.C. is willing to be convinced that when Harper’s Weekly prints a story entitled, in the boldest of type, ‘ The Case of Pièrre Lamotte,’ the printer’s devil, rather than the editor, should be sent to the penitentiary; but will it be believed that even a printer’s devil could be found committing such crimes in Beacon Street? The Cornhill Magazine publishes a tale called ‘ Ständchen ’ (it is about the well-worn song of Schubert), and it reappears in the Living Age as ‘Standchen.’ Not an isolated and pardonable slip of the types, mind you: wherever this everyday German word occurs, in title, page-headings, text, and table of contents, the umlaut-mark is conspicuously lacking. I repeat, Littell’s Living Age — a journal that once gave a cachet of puristic dignity to your library table! I wrote insultingly to the editor. I asked him since when he was printing Littell’s in Americanese — vouchsafed the opinion that ‘Standchen’ is to ‘Ständchen’ as ‘git’ is to ‘get.’ No reply has reached me, yet I still cling to the hope that one was lost in the mails reading thus: —

‘MY DEAR SIR: The deplorable error to which you call my attention was discovered by myself immediately upon my return to town after a month’s vacation, during which I had entrusted the conduct of my magazine to the editor of the Black Cat. I have promptly brought an action against this person for defamation of character,’ and so forth.

A recent addition to my private museum is the ‘Paris Number’ with which the publishers of Judge undertook to shock their readers on May 2, 1914. If any copies found their way to Paris, the attempt was undoubtedly successful over there. The picture on the cover is appropriately labeled ‘Outré,’ but the table of contents calls it ‘Outre’ (meaning ‘besides’ or a ‘leather bottle’ — take your choice). Most of the pictures inside bear French titles; that is to say, they may conceivably have been French before the printer did his worst. The most noticeable feature of this shocking number is the accents, which are sprinkled in liberal and haphazard profusion over words to which they do or do not belong, and all of which are obviously home-made; in other words, they were not cast with the type, but inserted separately and laboriously by the printer, and appear to be hardly on speaking terms with the letters. They must be seen to be appreciated. Last but not least, there is only one cedilla, and it deserves a glass case all to itself. Not because it occurs under the word ici, where it does n’t belong, but because the inspired printer has produced it by turning a figure 5 upside down! Let us hope he has had his reward! The Legion of Honor has been conferred for less cogent reasons.

I really cannot resist the temptation to give you a peep at this particular bibelot and a few others from the same casket. There they are, at the foot of this page.

Exhibit One, ladies and gentlemen, is the clou of the collection. Apart from the opening word où, printed in the best newspaperese, without the diacritic, this specimen rises only once above the commonplace level — but then to what a height of virtuosity! The simplicity of the setting only enhances the splendor of that typographic gem imbedded — of all places! — in the middle of ici. As the French has it — Voilà le hic. A subtle cryptogram, perhaps. Our attention is first arrested by où, then fascinated, paralyzed, by ici. In other words, to the breathless inquiry ‘ Where is it?’ succeeds the rapturous ejaculation ‘HERE it is — the original, the only Five-illa! ’ This alone is worth the price of a copy of Judge. Nay, if the value of a magazine could be fixed by similar criteria to those that prevail in postage-stamp collecting, then the price of the ‘Paris Number’ might be bid up to something incalculable.

(1) . “ Ou croyez-vous que vous vous trouvez iSi—dans
une maison flottante?”

(2) Les experts militaires declarent unanimement que l’ armee francaise fait des progres rapides.

(3) DANS CE CHER PARIS on Le Meilleur moyon pour apprecier Broadway.

(4) ENTENDU A L’ ACADÉMIE DE DANSE
“Veux—tu m’ accompagner a l’ eglise Dimanche, Fifi?”
“Ma mere n ’y consentira jamais sans un chaperon, Charles.”

Let us not cavil over the fact that our typographic virtuoso did not keep his ingenuity in leash until he reached the ‘francaise’ of Exhibit Two. Genius is a law unto itself. The accents poised in mid-air over this specimen need not long detain us. We pass on to Number Three, where the ‘ on ’ for ou and the ‘ moyon ’ for moyen are as nothing to the capital initials in ‘Le Meilleur.’ We have, in our time, paid exploratory visits to ‘cher Paris,’ yet we have unaccountably overlooked Le Meilleur. It is no boulevard café — of that we are positive. Neither is it a dubious resort on the Butte Montmartre — a depraved friend of ours, qui s’y connaît, has assured us that he knows it not. One possibility remains — those dressmakers’ shops in the Rue de la Paix. Perhaps some reader of the gentle gender can help us out?

We decline to keep luncheon waiting while we attempt to do justice to Number Four. After all, why reduce to mere prose formulas the fine phantasmagoric impression which this specimen of French as printed by a leading Fifth Avenue publisher produces upon the mind of any one who knows the French printed in France, Great Britain, Roumania, Peru, or the Solomon Islands? One stands spellbound before that sesquipedalian hyphen in ‘Veuxtu’; those hiatuses after ‘1’ ’ before ‘académie’ and ‘église’; that capital D in ‘Dimanche’; above all, before those volatile accents, which here reach their highest pitch of volatility. (Puzzle — Find the one that belongs over ‘mère.’)

One staggering question suggests itself: If this is Fifth Avenue, what is Walla Walla, Wash.? To the D.C., at least, it is obvious that the latter place does not exist at all.

It is high time to stop, even though scores of egregious sinners among the publishers of magazines, and the whole book-publishing community, escape scot-free.

We have written without worldly preoccupations. It is evident that nobody will print this.