You may know, or may not know, that we just had a son. He's now almost 7 weeks old and we took him to Wikimania in Poland. For that purpose, we had a passport made. You may remember, or may not remember, that passport making in the family is quite an adventure.

A tâche without an accent is just a stain.

Well, our son got his double hyphen alright, but they forgot his accent. Well, they forgot mine, really, since the accent is on my name. Not a tragedy, especially since the German passport has the last name written in capital letters, so people tend to forget accents on those anyway (not the WIkipedians, I know). Still, I would have liked him to have an accent, but we needed to go to Poland, so I decided to keep the passport like this.

But sometimes, forgetting the accent can lead to interesting interpretations. Proof, the banner on the spotify website, for an iPhone app. The banner reads "Multitache sur votre iPhone". It should read "Multitâche sur votre iPhone" (see the little accent circonflexe - hat- on the a?). The difference is huge. As it is, it advocates stains on yuor iPhone. Well, maybe that's the intended meaning, but I don't think so.

  • Multitache=multistain (tache= a stain, a dirty spot)
  • Multitâche=multitask (tâche= a task)

Moral of the story, if you don't want to end up dirty, you might want to pay attention to the accent.