Comments on Apostrophe Abuse: Cre'me Brule'e

Dead keys are used in order to generate some accen...

2008-11-28T11:55:45.954-08:00

Dead keys are used in order to generate some accents using the US-International keyboard layout. For "crème brûlée" ("crème brulée" is also acceptable according to Wikipedia), one would type "cr`eme br^ul'ee" and the computer would automatically place the accents.

Even with this in mind, I would definitely consider it apostrophe abuse.

In fact Italian may replace written accents with a...

2008-11-25T03:18:20.355-08:00

In fact Italian may replace written accents with an apostrophe: Caffè may be written caffe', and no one seems to consider it amiss, as best I can see (admittedly Italian is a second language for me, tho I have lived in Italy for the past ten years. The apostrophe-cum-circumflex in crême takes the ga'teau.

--SEA, Asolo

I work for a web company and my job involves readi...

2008-11-21T14:05:36.776-08:00

I work for a web company and my job involves reading text submitted by the general public - and I see this ALL the time. I don't think most non-tech savvy people have any idea that you can actually type punctuation marks correctly.

I do something similar when typing emails, etc. (n...

2008-11-19T05:59:33.876-08:00

I do something similar when typing emails, etc. (not papers or assignments, though) in Italian, since I don't readily know the alt-codes for accents. But for something like this? Come on. The "insert symbol" menu isn't hard to find. Even handwritten accents above the typed words would've been better.

This lady, whose name goes back to the 10th-centur...

2008-11-14T15:10:26.577-08:00

This lady, whose name goes back to the 10th-century Norse queen Ásta Guðbrandsdóttir, was already making the apostrophe-for-acute her trademark when she attended my high school 35 years ago and more, and even in the age of ISO-Latin-1 she still is.

I've actually seen that done before, but usually o...

2008-11-13T12:26:01.038-08:00

I've actually seen that done before, but usually only at the end of the word. I can't decide if I am glad that they even TRIED to accent the word, or if their lame attempt was just not even worth it. I'm totally torn. :)