Emoticonspiracy

"The French don't care what you do, actually, as long as you pronounce it properly." -- Prof. Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady."

#JeSuisCirconflexe -- Social media hashtag.

   The Academie Francaise said students should not be penalized when they fail to use accent marks when preparing assignments. And when several book publishers said they will include sans-circumflex spellings in textbooks, the result was fury and outrage.
   How are students to know how to pronounce a word if accent markings are missing? Where will all those orphaned cedilles  hang out? This is a grave, if not an acute, problem.
   "A sad day," said one observer. "First cursive writing went out the window. Now the digital keyboard may be in decline. We may be left with nothing but the emoticon," the observer lamented. "Words will simply fail us entirely."
   Moreover, the crisis has gone international, prompting France's education minister to say the changes will not mean the end of the circumflex, according to a BBC report, and that both old and new spellings will remain correct. The circumflex is the hat-like symbol over vowels that indicates a pronunciation change.
   Part of the reason for the move is the increasing dominance of computer keyboards in writing, since finding the various accent marks requires additional work. But this "dumbing down" of the writing process n'es pas un excuse, say protesters, and this was aggravated by the listing of more than 2,000 French words with proposed new spellings.
   The French Academy has long been known for its fierce defence of linguistic purity, leading to a ban on the import of le weekend  into the language.
   While it's true that English has for centuries borrowed, adopted, taken, or stolen many words from French and other languages, dropping accent markings in the process, this is no consolation to the warriors in la guerre linguistique.
   The language war accelerated after reports that publishers would add spelling reforms in books for the upcoming academic year. Students will then have a choice, the BBC reported, to use either the old spellings or the new ones, and teachers will have to accept both as correct.
   Good luck with that one. Or as it might appear in the new French version, Bon chance avec ce ca.
   Somehow it doesn't look the same without the cedille hanging there.