Corking a waaaay-off topic, if I can - - -

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@domain.elided>]

In AD8-0045 Sonny (maxid@mindspring) writes "I am sure John knows, but it is
not clear from the message that the umlaut and the diaeresis are not exactly
the same". John didn't, but should now. John, who is neither a linguist nor a
gramarian, had been misunderstanding a clearly written statement in a
reference work which would have been more clear to the more literate. Sorry.

 I appreciate, enjoyed, and will be saving in an appropriate place Sonny's two
posts on diacritical marks, but this discussion has now wandered far from the
original Alfa-related topic of Spider versus Spyder. I am sorry about the
blistered page-down fingers. If it is any consolation, the GM-marketing /
American-consumers thread affects me similarly.

 Distantly related topic: I rarely write within my mail program, but rather
block copy-and-paste into it; two or three time since I switched from AOL to
Earthlink the subject lines of my posts have suffered. In my post to AD8-0039
my subject line had been Re: "Hope the characters make it to the list." but it
appeared on the digest as =?iso-8859-1?Q?
Re:_=22Hope_the_characters_make_it_to_the_list.= 22?=. I apologize for the
formatting garbage, but wish I understood just enough about why it happens to
reliably avoid it in the future. One digester suggested off-digest that it is
because I don't use a Macintosh, but that can hardly be the whole story.

 Sigh,

John H.

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