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Journal Ethelred Unraed's Journal: The evil bit of the English language 34

Journal by Ethelred Unraed
Thanks to a brief conversation with gmhowell, it has come to my attention that the English language has a built-in evil bit: the umlaut.

Thus your evil twin's name is spelt with an umlaut. The more umlauts, the more evil he or she is.

Think of things like Mötley Crüe. Really evil. Or worse, Blue Öyster Cult, alias BÖE. Yep, you got it...my wife's evil twin.

If your name lacks a vowel*, you must umlaut a consonant, thus making you so evil that your name cannot be written**, let alone spoken.

Thus the world may face the infamy of Ëthëlrëd Ünräëd in the near future.

...

* - Not bloody likely, but hey.

** - At least not in any usual Net forum. Some restrictions apply. Not valid in a jurisdiction near you. Tithe daily.

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The evil bit of the English language More

The evil bit of the English language

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  • tüxette über alles?
  • Oddly, Wikipedia had a featured article on the Heavy Metal Umlaut [wikipedia.org] recently.

    --slöthdög

  • See, this just goes to prove that Americans are good, honest people, whereas Europeans are evil sick fucks who dine on puppies, and call it cuisine. See, Good American keyboards don't easily show umlauts (aka: the sign of the devil). We are so good that we don't even need to refer to umlauted heathens. But Europeans are so EVIL that they need to be able to generate multiple umlauts.
    • Ah do nut know wet you mean, you seely Merican co-lo-neest.

      We FREEEEEEEENCH do nut hef ze ooom-loud. So we are nut eeee-vill.*

      Oui, ça va.

      * - Though they do use it on "Noël". Thus is Christmas in France evil, proving once and for all that France is, in fact, Bizarro World.

      Cheers,

      Ethelred

  • Ëm Ëmälb....

    Ï'm täkïng övër thë wörld.

    FËÄR MË!!!111one one!
  • Not bloody likely, but hey.

    ..
    /cry

  • It's not really an umlaut. An umlaut is a sound shift represented by the sign in many languages, german for instance. But there is no umlaut in English (and in, for instance, danish, an umlauted a is represented with a character that doesn't have the mark.) A better word for the marks would be diaeresis which refers to the mark itself ('the two pricks' as we say here in Sweden) rather than to a sound change it is sometimes but not always used to indicate. Particularly when you're explicitly talking about us

    • ('the two pricks' as we say here in Sweden)

      Thät's thë fünnïëst thïng Ï'vë rëäd tödäy.
    • A better word for the marks would be diaeresis

      No no no no no. "Dieresis" does not sound sufficiently foreign and Germanic (and thus is not sufficiently evil). "Umlaut" is thus far more appropriate.

      The irony being that "umlaut" is not spelt with an umlaut. We shall hereby correct this:

      Ümläüt.

      Pronounced exactly as spelled. ;-)

      Cheers,

      Ethelred

      • The irony being that "umlaut" is not spelt with an umlaut.

        But diaeresis does have an umlaut. Diäresis, diæresis... hmm you're right though, it doesn't sound sufficiently evil, even though it does have an umlaut.

        I'll have to think about this, it's clearly a complicated issue.

  • Hmmm. (Score:1)

    by sebi ( 152185 )
    I say that putting the umlaut on the letter e is cheating. CHEATING. Even if this makes it almost impossible for me to evilify my Slashdot username. Sebï? I mean, come on! Sebästïän is pretty evil, though. Oh please, let it be pretty evil.
    • Oh please, let it be pretty evil.

      You want to be pretty evil? Pretty? You know what song came to mind when I read that...
      I'm so pretty, oh so pretty, and witty, and GAAAAAAAAAYYY.

      Pretty and evil don't really seem to go together, but... whatever floats yer boat... ;-)
      • Pretty and evil don't really seem to go together

        They don't? Boy, you need to watch some James Bond movies [wikipedia.org]...

        • That's not pretty - that's sexy.
          • Hmmmpf... And since when is sexy != pretty? Sure, you can have a pretty girl that isn't sexy, but a sexy woman is by definition also pretty... To me at least.

            And besides, aren't squirrels all cute and pretty? You *know* how evil those are! (Just ask Some Woman!)

          • What are you trying to say? That I am not sexy? That better not be what you are trying to say. Because I surely rank among the sexiest Slashdotters. Well, I mean Ethelred is the one and only number one in that ranking. Everbody knows that. But after that there can't be more than a couple of hundred thousand sexier than I am!

            Also, are you questioning my sexuality? As far as I know it is mostly a shade of green. Make of that what you will.

    • Uhm... In dutch, it is called a 'trema' and is most common on the 'e'. I think it can occur on an 'i' too, but I just can't think of any word right now.

      Anyways, greeting from (not very evil, just 3 "umlauts") jäwthëshärk.

      • Actually, in the old days (no so long ago, really -- as late as WWII) the dieresis or "trema" was also used in English in the same way it is in Dutch -- to mark a split vowel diphthong, that is, the vowel marked with the dieresis is to be pronounced separately.

        Some old books still write "coöperation" instead of "co-operation", for example, or "preëmpt" for "pre-empt" or "preempt". This is also the reason for the "ë" in "Charlotte Brontë".

        However, like older spellings such as "to-day"

  • ...yürï bënjämïn.

    Sheesh, there must be an easier way than typing ä, ë, ï, ö and ü for ä, ë, ï, ö and ü

    Anyway, I know it's gotta be evil when I get spam for vïägrä and crap.
  • The keyboard settings on this new machine I got makes it way too easy to put dots on top of the first letter of string constants. For example,

    fprintf(fp, ät line %d\n", line);

    Instant syntax error there! Now, once I get used to this, my strings when I write them at the other machines will begin with an extra space I guess -- not good either way.

    But at least I found one place I can put this to good use!

    hmm... and another thing, if gööd == evil, would ëvïl == good ? Or would it

  • Because then I don't know what to make of Einstürzende Neubauten.

    I think it should only count for English names/words, and that it isn't the evil bit, but the dork bit.

    The satire of this is DeathTongue, but I don't remember where the umlaut was.
  • ïnsänëäcärbönbäsëdlïfëför m!

    That's 11 ëvïl bïts, for those who are counting, thus keeping the parity odd, an essential piece of maintaining "ëvïlïty", something which the unevil, even paritied Ethelred missed. That's right, his evil twin isn't even evil. It's a sad day, alright. Very sad.

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