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Arrant Pedantry
Personal blog · arrantpedantry.comwritingculture
Arrant Pedantry is a personal blog at arrantpedantry.com about writing and culture. Since 2016, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's posts on English diacritics, such as umlauts and diaereses, and on New Yorker house style. The comments cite it as a reference rather than judging its writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-03-04
What Hacker News says?
Do you have any linguists consulting / on staff? Bryan Garner might be a careful compiler but doesn't seem to be a linguist and seems to be a traditionalist who makes simple errors. e.g. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001869.h... "His chapter is unfortunately full of repetitions of stupidities of the past tradition in English grammar — more of them than you could shake a stick at." http://langua…
Comment linking /2007/01/02/editing-chicago/
on “Proselint”Submitted Learning how dictionaries work as a story · 41 points
HN discussionUnless The Economist does it as well, you were probably thinking of The New Yorker. https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...
Comment linking /2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-and-the-new-yorker/
on “Why English doesn't use accents”Submitted Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020) as a story · 35 points
HN discussion>It's a bit old-fashioned in English, but you sometimes will see it in older texts on words like "coöperation". You don't even need to search for older texts! The New Yorker actually uses the diaresis in their print edition. It's certainly a bit anachronistic, but I do think English spelling can be a bit obtuse to say the least, so the orthographic hint can sometimes be useful. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cult…
Comment linking /2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-and-the-new-yorker/
on “LibreRPi – open source replacements for RPi firmware”Submitted Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe New Yorker house style. https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-... Seems weird to me, I'd just use a hyphen, but that's how they roll.
Comment linking /2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-and-the-new-yorker/
on “Leaving the U.S. for the Netherlands”Submitted Skunked Terms and Scorched Earth as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI suspect the diaresis was intentional, in “New Yorker” style. https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...
Comment linking /2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-and-the-new-yorker/
on “OpenAI Livestream”