AP style is not an excuse for Anglocentrism

From the AP Stylebook Online:

accent marks Do not use any diacritical or accent marks because they cause garble for some users. See also the Filing Practices chapter on Nontransmitting Symbols.

From the above-mentioned Filing Practices:

accent marks Do not use them; they cause garbled copy in some newspaper computers.

I don’t know why I should be surprised that the Associated Press is so backward. The organization still uses “Web site,” for goodness’ sake.

But this example is a more serious problem. It’s not just technologically backward; it’s culturally backward as well.

Diacritical and accent marks wouldn’t exist if they didn’t convey meaning — such is the nature of language. A top-of-my-head example from Spanish: “Papá,” roughly translated, means “Daddy.” “Papa” means “potato.” And many other languages are even more sensitive with regards to meaning.

Not to mention that butchering a language is annoying, even offensive, to native speakers. Imagine there’s a land called Uu, and the people there don’t have any O’s in their language. When writing English words, they substitute the most similar letter, which they determine is U. You, as a part of the English-speaking minority, will just have to deal.

Now, every Wednesday you catch up with the smoke monster on a new episode of Lust (which now sounds like a daytime drama or a high-end porno mag). You check your e-mail on your iPhune. You drink a glass of urange juice (UJ). In fact, “you” are now “yuu.”

And I thought it was annoying to have the B lowercased in my last name.

Obviously, some things have to be Anglicized somewhat — it would be impractical to write proper names in the original Farsi or Japanese. But ignoring diacritical marks is a disservice to our readers that we can pretty easily rectify.

In many cases nowadays — at least in HTML-based apps — we should be able to keep the text from being garbled by special characters.  But it’s possible there are still some communication problems among browsers and Web/e-mail programs regarding symbols, so if the AP wants to keep its practices for filing stories mostly as they are, OK. However, the organization needs to head off the over-literal stylebook-worshippers and make it easier for member publications that want to honor diacritical marks to do so. The AP should request that contributing writers and editors note if there is a word or name in their story that ought to have a special character, so individual publications can make the choice for themselves.

Newspapers and other publications should make using special characters common practice. That’s what house style is for — adapting the AP’s guidelines to your audience and adapting its filing practices into practical usage.

And for not alienating our readers.

Thoughts? Experiences?