Sir, – Ted O’Sullivan (June 30th) complains about the gaeilgeoir equivalent of “greengrocer’s apostrophe”. Mr O’Sullivan should know, however, that rarely used accents are very shy creatures outside of their natural habitats. They lurk in the deep undergrowth of word processing programs where only the most intrepid typographers can reliably track them down.
Worse still, they scurry away without trace at the merest whisper of the name of an e-mail program. And as if this weren’t bad enough, one often finds their less bashful interloper-friends # and >brazenly stepping in to take their place at the shortest of notice, to the dismay of subeditors everywhere.
What better example of these natural phenomena could there be than Mr O’Sullivan’s own spelling of O Riada (sic), without its required síneadh fada? – Yours, etc,