We live in a word where most texts are hastily typed, often on a phone, and nobody really cares about spelling and grammar anymore. This makes diacritics an endangered species.
I recently typed the word "naive" and, even though my spellchecker didn't care, felt a strange urge to spell it "naiive", which is incorrect. I researched and found out it can be spelled "naïve". According to Wiktionary, both spellings are correct. It's easy to imagine why. Somehow, this makes me sad, though. I like the spelling with the diaeresis, because it makes the word special. It is a nice, subtle memento of its French origin and it gives vital information about how to pronounce it which, you must agree, the English language is lacking way too often. Reading the word "naïve" feels strangely pleasurable, now. It gives me the sense that the author of the text really cared. That it's someone who does not follow the societal trend of only ever doing the minimum that is required. That there is still room for beauty in a world where more and more forms are aggressively pressured to follow function.
After this moment of reflection, I made a decision. I have naïvely spelled the word "naive" for the longest time. From now on I will always spell it "naïve", whatever it takes. All I had to do was find out how to actually do that. My keyboard doesn't have a key with an ï on it, after all. That's where the trouble starts. I live in Germany, so I usually use the QWERTZ keyboard layout. I'm also on Windows most of the time. The only reliable way to type this character that I could find is holding down the "Alt" key and typing 0239 on the numpad. There's other ways that work in office applications, but I'm typing this post in my browser.
One thing I just found out, that makes this process even more annoying, is the fact that you need to really make sure that the "Num Lock" mode is activated when doing this. Otherwise, you will activate the dumbest and most pointless keyboard shortcuts that map to the browsers "back" function, causing you to have to retype your entire blog post.
I'll be honest, when I decided I'll always spell it "naïve", whatever it takes, I did not imagine it'd take that much. But I'm committed. It is saddening that it's yet another one of these battles that I'll have to fight against the windmills of bad user interfaces and an ignorant society. Maybe some of you will join me, although it might be too much to ask. Let's just hope I'll write the word "naïve" often enough, so that I'll be able to remember that stupid number.
