Crazy but true, I have a subscription to The New Yorker. Normally I couldn’t (or wouldn’t try to) afford it. But last year they offered me a subscription at a no-brainer price, and I took it, with the assumption that the cartoons alone would make it worth the money.
The cartoons do indeed make it worth the money. But what, you might ask, is the next best thing about the magazine? The stories and poems are good, it’s true. The online crosswords are, too. And yet, what I really love are the diaereses.
Yes, it’s those double-dots that have grabbed my attention and won my affection. You can go months, years even, without seeing a single diaeresis, but they’re everywhere in The New Yorker. Coördinator. Anaïs. Reënactment. Oh, glory! My version of WordPress didn’t even offer a way (that I could find) to create a diaeresis symbol, so I had to add a plug-in for it. And now that I’ve done that, I’m just sÔ hÃppy thÆt Î waŋt tŏ shouŦ, “Ĩ ❤ sⱣecial €haracters! DouɃle-dotś foreëver!”
It’s the small things that give life its zest.
I will say that after decades of switching between pcs and Macs on a daily basis, the one place Macs continue to shine is in the ease of adding diacritical marks to text.