You can keep your hat on

Non, non, non—qu’est-ce que on me dit? French publishers are moving away from the use of the accent circonflexe—you know, that little hat that sits on top of some vowels to give you a clue as to how to pronounce the word.

When I was studying French, back in the last century, l’accent circonflexe was a clue that another letter had once been part of the word (usually an S), but had disappeared. Château and fenêtre (castle and window) are the examples I recall; at some point in the mists of time, the words had once been chastel and fenestra.

In addition it lengthens the letter O in configurations where otherwise the sound would be shorter. My favorite example: Côtes du Rhône; without the circonflexe that gorgeous red wine would be more like “cot du run”. It probably would still taste wonderful, however…

But the diacritical mark also serves to distinguish a word from something with the same spelling but entirely different meaning. Examples would be jeûne (from jeûner, to fast, to refrain from food and drink) vs. jeune (young, or a young person).

The Académie française apparently proposed changes in the French language that included letting go of l’accent circonflexe (and hyphens in a bunch of words; but I don’t care so much about that) back in 1990, but only now have publishers of school books announced they’re implementing it.

And let me just say, this has unleashed such a social media tempête de merde that much of the world is under a brown-out. I mean—the tweets, the tweets!

Many of them are beyond my ability to convey in English, but here’s one I particularly liked:

Basically, “A joke 50 years from now: ‘Yo mama’s so old, she knew the accent circonflexe.’”

And this:

“It starts by suppressing the accents and finishes by writing ‘sa va’ [instead of ça va] in the dictionary…Welcome to illiteracy.”

The rallying hashtag is #JeSuisCirconflexe.

Here’s what I say: They can have my accent circonflexe when they take it from my cold, dead hands.

Point.