Monthly Archives: June 2014

PROBLEMS WITH “SO-CALLED” AND «SOI-DISANT»

In English-speaking anarchist, radical left, and onkwehón:we sovereignty circles in the Ottawa-administered part of Turtle Island, it is common to append the word “so-called” to any mention of a place on this continent whose name is colonial in origin. Generally speaking, the hyphenated word “so-called” is written out without quote marks, whereas the colonial name is in quotes. Examples: “so-called ‘Canada'”, “so-called ‘New Brunswick'”.

This is a sort of land acknowledgement, although it should probably be thought of as a weak acknowledgement rather than a strong one. By itself, saying “so-called” doesn’t call attention to the specific fact that the place so described is part of the territory of one or more onkwehón:we nations. It literally indicates nothing more than the fact that, indeed, the place is frequently referred to by the name we are using to refer to it. As analysis, this would make for a rather banal observation. Worse, it is an observation that can be made about basically anything. For example, ai might offer you a so-called chair, because, indeed, the chair is so-called. Why is it called “chair” instead of “gizunga” or “bumrest” or “koobidactly”?

The word “so-called”, of course, is functional as a descriptor, but it is not actually being used for a descriptive purpose in particular. It is being used more as a pejorative, more for its rhetorical effect. What it literally says isn’t particularly important, because all the meaning is in the tone – something that is quite audible when we say “so-called” then the toponym aloud, and which can still be indicated in a textual format through the addition of quote marks around the toponym.

If we overuse the word “so-called”, it loses that rhetorical effect. But before getting into that, let’s discuss the hyphenated word that is used to translate “so-called” in French, namely «soi-disant».

A closer translation of «soi-disant» to English would be “self-saying”, but it’s probably better to translate it as “self-styled” or “self-described” in most circumstances. Thus, in reference to «Québec» (the name to which «soi-disant» is most frequently appended, with «Montréal» probably coming in at a close second), what is literally being said is that Québec calls itself «Québec».

Ai don’t like this. First off, it isn’t only Québec (read: Québecers) that calls itself (read: themselves) Québec, because if a Chilean or a Senegalese or a Bulgarian is talking about Québec for some reason, ey will call it «Québec» as well (or use the equivalent name in their language).

«Soi-disant» doesn’t say that no one else is describing it as such, of course, but even if Québec changed its name, this doesn’t guarantee that others would pay any attention. This is true of Canada, too, although its rather unlikely that either Québec or Canada will change their official names any time soon.

Many people still refer to Myanmar as “Burma” (or «Birmanie» in French) despite the name change in 1989, and it took a very long time for people for the names “Persia” and “Siam” to go out of style for Iran and Thailand respectively. Lots of people still call the Congo «Zaïre» – and why not, since there is another country called the Congo next door, which is just a “republic” instead of a “democratic republic”. Speaking of republics, the Czech Republic would like it known that the country is actually called “Czechia” in English and «Tchéquie» in French; you should only refer to “the Czech Republic” when you’re referring to the government. As for the Netherlands («Pays-Bas» in French), the locals have practically given up on getting people to use the correct name; even the country’s state-supported tourism website uses the name “Holland”, since, as this guy points out, that’s what people are probably looking up on Google if they want to book a vacation there.

But let’s concede that, at the moment, Québec and Canada are self-described as such – by their government and by those who, more or less, comprise what can be called Québécois and Canadian society. Yet the Québec, or wherever else, being referred to in «le soi-disant ‘Québec’» is, usually, not the government and not the society. It’s the place called Québec. It’s the land. In this case, «soi-disant» (again, “self-described” or “self-styled” in English) does not work. A place can be “so-called”, but it cannot be «soi-disant» because a place does not describe itself. A place does not speak, neither about itself nor about anything else.

This is my more serious objection to «soi-disant» as a translation. Taken literally, it says something nonsensical: the mountains, the trees, and the soil are proclaiming themselves to be named Québec! Taken less literally, it would seem to reify some kind of inherent and timeless relationship between Québecers (who can self-describe) to the territory called Québec. Such reification is, to say the least, problematic.

It seems to me that better translations for “so-called” are available. Google Translate provides «ainsi nommé» as a possible alternative, although ai suspect that this lacks the same sarcastic/dismissive tone that’s imbued in “so-called”, «soi-disant», “self-styled”, and “self-described”. Perhaps it could be imbued with such a tone over time, though. It might also be possible to say «ce qu’on appelle» before each mention of a colonial name. Ultimately, though, this is a matter that a mother tongue speaker needs to put eir mind to – not me.

Realistically, though, ai suspect «soi-disant» will be difficult to supplant as the standard anti-colonial toponym descriptor in the French language without a change to the way that said descriptor is applied in the normative anarchist discourse of both languages. In English, for example, the descriptor is used in a large number of cases – very often for cities and towns, and definitely for provinces and Canada itself. The style in French is to apply it to the same cases as in English.

Frankly, this is too many cases.

First off, there is a clear difference between cities, towns, and villages in comparison to provinces or the territory of the Canadian state in its entirety. Like, compare Saskatchewan to some of the settlements that exist within it, like Saskatoon or Regina. Whereas Saskatchewan is actually just a gigantic rectangle superimposed upon the oblate spheroid of Earth – a jurisdiction whose borders don’t even roughly correspond with natural geographic features like rivers or mountains – the settlements actually have some substance to them. There are buildings, roads, parks, shopping malls, etc. These settlements concretely exist. If we wouldn’t refer to “so-called ‘McGill University'”, “so-called ‘rue Sherbrooke'”, or “so-called ‘parc Jeanne-Mance'”, it doesn’t really make sense to refer to “so-called ‘Montréal'”.

Of course, municipal borders can be quite arbitrary too. Montréal is the perfect example of this. For example, while Westmount – adjacent to the western end of downtown Montréal, and completely surrounded on all sides by three of Montréal’s boroughs – exists as a separate city, the essentially rural Île Bizard is administered from Montréal City Hall. The situation was even more ridiculous before the 2002 merger, when today’s borough of Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles was cut off from the rest of the city by the separate municipalities of Montréal-Est (still separate today), Anjou, and Montréal-Nord. All that said, there is still a sense of what is and what isn’t Montréal that exists quite apart from whatever the actual borders are. See also: the Halifax Regional Municipality versus the actual place that most people would think of when you say “Halifax”.

It’s pretty easy to imagine a very bourgeois anglophone in Westmount speaking disparagingly of somewhere being part of “so-called ‘Montréal'” during the period from 2002 to 2004 when all smaller municipalities on the island had their autonomy revoked. Similarly, a farmer in Musquodoboit Valley today, pissed off that he pays extra taxes even though he doesn’t even get bus service, might say the same about somewhere within the municipal borders of Halifax. In both cases, anti-colonial politics probably aren’t present, and there is no calling-into-question of Montréal or Halifax as places that exist. It’s simply that the official designations of these places do not correspond with either the intuitive reality, the perception of how it should be, or both.

For us, as anarchists, it must be said that we usually have a pretty strong sense of where we are. We have opinions, for example, about what the neighbourhoods we live in are called (see the slogan FUCK! HO! MA! MON QUARTIER EST HOCHELAGA!) and what the borders of those neighbourhoods are. These borders are usually pretty intuitive. Where they aren’t, they are usually ignored. Using another Montréal example, who actually cares about the distinction between Ville-Émard and Côte-Saint-Paul or the distinction between Hochelaga and Maisonneuve? If you’re like me, you call the whole thing Ville-Émard or Hochelag’, respectively, and then you don’t worry about it.

We don’t append the names of neighbourhoods with the word “so-called”, or at least ai’ve never heard of people doing so. Montréal as a whole, however, often gets the “so-called” treatment. This is despite the fact that probably most of us have a sense of what is and what isn’t Montréal that runs contrary to the official definition. For example, if you live here, you would probably group Île Bizard and Pierrefonds (administered as part of Montréal) in with Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Dorval, and Beaconsfield (separate municipalities); it’s all just the West Island to you! The distinction is self-evident, and that’s true whether you tend to speak of so-called Montréal or not.

This long tangent had a purpose. My proposal is that we should reserve use of the word “so-called” for cases where the official definitions of places do not correspond with intuitive conceptions of place that are widely held by the people who live in those places. In the case of Montréal – and all settlements – this means generally dropping the use of the name “so-called”. There might be times when it makes sense to use, but probably few. If we want to say that Île Bizard is part of the Montréal municipality, for instance, it’s probably easier to just say it like that, without “so-called”.

My proposal doesn’t apply only to settlements, though. It may also apply to larger regions. Québec, for example.

To me, it makes intuitive sense to think of Québec as being anywhere that significant numbers of Québecers live – and so as to exclude certain neighbourhoods of Miami, anywhere where they perceive the land to be standing upon to be Québécois. Ai don’t think it makes sense to refer to this area as “so-called ‘Québec'” because doing so seems to imply that Québec is just some arbitrary, ephemeral thing. It isn’t. There are clear, experiential differences between being in Québec and not-Québec.

Ai’ve had friends argue that these differences are “produced by the state”, and therefore somehow illegitimate as criteria by which to define a territory, but ai reject that argument. Obviously Québec is a contrivance of colonial state institutions, but it is not simply the state that makes it real. If the borders were all to be rendered meaningless tomorrow, and all the police and politicians sucked into a black hole, there would still be settlements with all-French signage, inhabited by people who not only understand themselves as Québecers, but who also have typically Québécois understandings of reality. On opinions about gun control, abortion, climate change, wind power, the Alberta tar sands, the Queen, the war in Afghanistan, and so on, you will notice a statistically significant and consistent difference between Québec and the rest of the Canadas. Although ai’m at a loss to find it now, ai once saw a page that showed several maps of the Canadas in relation to these each of these subjects, with each province shaded in accordance with the aggregate of responses in that province to random telephone polling. Québec was typically at the extreme of opinion in relation to the other provinces, and, in several cases, it was a clear outlier.

This doesn’t simply have to do with language, for the record. Years after “German reunification” in 1990, there is still a very noticeable social difference between those living in territory that corresponds to the erstwhile German Democratic Republic, and those living in the rest of Germany. Simply put, the fact that East Germany was administered by a different state for so long – one which had a very different legal system and political structure, took a very different approach to the economy, and which sought to inculcate the population with different values – matters quite a bit, even now, a generation since the moment that Realsozialismus was abolished in Germany and the whole of what we call “Germany” today came under the sovereignty of a single unitary state.

An important point, though: my definition of Québec includes much less territory than either of the  official territorial definitions. It might generously account for a fifth of the territory that is administered by the Canadian state as part of the province of Québec. This is because, in the great northern expanse of this territory, French is usually a third language, there is typically an extra level of governance between the locality and Québec City (this level being either a band council or regional development corporation), the economy and demographics are entirely different, and so on and so forth.

Ai would argue that a way of talking about Québec that directly challenges the ambitions of megalomaniacal nationalists, but that doesn’t imply that Québec is a total fiction, has a much better chance of spreading a better understanding of the situation in the larger population. This pretty much requires the dropping of “so-called ‘Québec'” as a style, though, since the perception of 80% of the province’s territory as being not-Québec requires an acceptance that the rest basically is. This is an easier argument to make, an easier argument to swallow, for those who intuit Québec as extant. It doesn’t directly call attention to the reality of Québec as a settler-colonial society on stolen onkwehón:we land, but then again, neither does saying “so-called”. And it certainly doesn’t deny settler colonialism, either, which is the thing we would really need to worry about.

Different provinces are different – for example, “British Columbia”, the first geographic entity to which it became popular to append the word “so-called”. The thing about British Columbia is that it doesn’t really make any sense as a territory; there isn’t really a British Columbian society that has unique characteristics, cultural or otherwise, unto itself which aren’t shared with neighbouring societies. A lot of things that you might think of as uniquely British Columbian are really just shared with other parts of what we can think of as Cascadian society. The conservative settler society of the interior, a lacuna in most perceptions of British Columbia, is probably on the same political continuum as settler society in rural Alberta. The only thing that holds British Columbia together, then, is the state. If Vancouver Island had been incorporated into Canada as a separate province, or if Fort St. John and other such locales had been included in Alberta, ai consider it pretty unlikely that we would be able to perceive any transcendant British Columbianess uniting these places in defiance of the borders.

Compare and contrast this situation to Kurdistan or Acadie. Compare and contrast, too, to the situation in many parts of the former Soviet Union, where significant portions of the population reject the authority of whatever former Soviet republic now rules them as a sovereign state (or, at the least, attempts to do so). Finally, imagine Montréal becoming a separate Canadian province, as some people want. Exactly how many nationalists, within this new province or outside of it, would suddenly change their definition of Québec’s territory to match the new official reality?

Ai’d say the frequent, consistent use of “so-called ‘British Columbia'” makes a lot of sense. It further denaturalizes a conception of place that is already pretty incongruent with popular perceptions. A lot of people in Prince George can’t relate to what life is like in Victoria, and vice versa; even in the sort of future anarchist utopia that has regional coordination between federated communities (you know, bolo’bolo style), it’s hard to imagine many situations where people in both these cities would ever even need to discuss anything with one another to the exclusion of, say, people on the other side of today’s border with the United States.

It’s important to note that one of the original reasons for describing British Columbia as so-called, as frequently cited by people involved in the anti-colonial/anti-capitalist campaign against the 2010 Olympic Games, is because – with the exception of the sparsely populated parts of the province’s northeast, which falls under the purview of Treaty 8 – the entire province exists on unceded land. If this is the characteristic by which we determine whether a geographic entity should be consistently described as “so-called” or not, then Québec is even more deserving of the label than British Columbia; as a percentage of its official territory, Québec is comprised of even more unceded land than B.C. is.

Ai don’t think unceded land, however, is something that we should really take into consideration for this purpose. First of all, Treaty 8 – like most other treaties that ceded land to the British crown, if not all of them – was signed under duress, and second, fuck colonial law anyway. The decisions that we make, whether about how we are going to refer to particular places or about anything else, should never be predicated on the idea that the Canadian state has “legitimate title” to any of its claimed territory. Ai understand why people talk about treaties, and ai don’t think it’s necessarily bad to do so, but ultimately, treaties should not matter to us except in the context of making arguments for the courts.

In any case, saying “so-called ‘British Columbia'” is a means to ease people into a conversation about settler colonialism (and, if you like, treaties or the lack thereof), whereas “so-called ‘Québec'” isn’t useful to this end. “So-called” works for B.C. because B.C. already doesn’t make sense, even to settlers. It isn’t a name with which people strongly identify compared to names that designate smaller areas, such as “Okanagan Valley”, “Vancouver”, “Vancouver Island”, or even “northern British Columbia”. “Québec”, on the other hand, is very experientially real to most of the population of that territory designated as Québec, as well as the people who visit that territory. People perceive, accurately, that there is a Québécois society that has distinctive characteristics, and that this society has some relationship to a particular territory.

One aspect of this society-to-territory relationship is settler-colonial occupation. This is clear to us, the minority of people with at least moderately developed anti-colonial politics, but it is not clear to others. It is something that, at least to some degree, ai think we would all like to make clear to the larger population. Ai don’t have the answer as to how to do that, exactly, but it seems to me that questioning the existence of Québec – which the appendage of the word “so-called” to that toponym seems to do, though perhaps unintentionally – is not an effective means to this end, especially because it seems likely to spur confusion, and because it undermines the more pressingly necessary effort to get self-conceived Québecers to stop thinking that they own that great expanse to the north of where they live. It is the Labrador Peninsula, after all, that is currently undergoing the most accelerated development in Québec City-administered territory.

“So-called”, as a standard anti-colonial toponym descriptor, is now a cliché. That’s fine! Clichés, while not actually saying very much about anything, are sometimes useful. And sometimes they aren’t. Ai’d say the case of B.C. is an example of this cliché being useful towards various ends. Ai’d say, again, that the case of Québec probably isn’t. But ai might be wrong on this, of course. At this point in the post, if you’ve made it so far, ai’m sure you either agree with the overall arch of my argument, or you don’t. Let me know!

Just before concluding, though, ai’d like to assert that it definitely isn’t useful to think that you need to say “so-called” every time you utter a colonial toponym as a means of showing your peers that your politics are sufficiently anti-colonial. Neither is it useful to think that you have a solid analysis because you use the right words, nor is it useful to present to others – even accidentally – that you think the way you talk is doing something to dispel the reality of settler colonialism in so-called Canada.

Separate from off-the-mark analyses about the language we use in our little subculture having any profound effect on capitalism or civilization, saying “so-called” is, by itself, mostly harmless – up until the point that it becomes a sort of shibboleth by which we determine whether people belong to our in-group or not. So let’s stop doing that!

THE COLONIAL NAME OF MONTRÉAL IN ENGLISH: ACCENT OR NO?

So ai live in Montréal, Québec. That’s the colonial name of this place, of course, but also the name by which the vast majority of people who live around here know this place, and that’s almost certainly even more true for people who don’t live around here, who only know it from photos or maps or tourist guides. The indigenous name of this place, coming from Kanien’kéha, is «Tioh:tiàke» – and ai’m going to talk about that too, though not as much. Ai don’t think ai’d have that much to say about it, anyway, other than: if you live here and you didn’t know that name, you should LEARN IT. NOW!

But first, let’s discuss the colonial name a bit. For simplicity’s sake, ai am just going to talk about the name of the city specifically, but literally everything ai’m about to say applies to the name of the province as well. Basically, there is a widespread understanding that the proper way to write the name of Montréal in English is to do the opposite of what ai’ve been doing in the entirety of this post (and this blog) so far. Instead of including the accent aigu over the letter-ee [e, E], as ai do, you should drop it. Thus, according to the folks that have this understanding, the name of this city should be written “Montreal”.

How widespread is this understanding? It’s hard to say. Let’s imagine someone from Los Angeles goes on vacation to Montréal and writes a blog post about it. Or let’s imagine an English-language author from Mumbai writes an espionage novel that includes a short scene in Montréal for some reason. Or let’s imagine some teenager in Kamloops decides to text her best friend about how she wants to go university in Montréal after high school. Ai am going to guess that none of these people will use an accent aigu, but when it comes to these folks, ai don’t think any of them is likely to have a thought-out position on the proper orthography for this city’s English name. They either don’t care, or they’re using the style that they’re likely to see whenever they look at an atlas or read a tourist guide, or it’s a slight hassle to type that character and they figure the editor can catch it, or whatever. My point is this: while these people might not spell out Montréal’s name with the accent, they don’t necessarily think it absolutely should not be written out with the accent when writing in English.

But the understanding that, indeed, the name of Montréal simply cannot be written with an accent when writing in English is fairly widespread among Canadian anglophones that consider themselves literate and who pride themselves on the professionalism of their emails and the care they put into their spelling. In the areas of Ottawa and Montréal specifically, there are quite a few of these anglophones who, as a part of their job or perhaps as a part of other activities they are involved in, actually find themselves writing emails or other sorts of documents in French quite often; such folks may either use a French-language keyboard all the time, as ai do, or they may have a toggle on their desktop that allows them to switch between French mode and English mode at will.

This understanding is backed up by certain anglophone institutions, too, and the most conspicuous of these are those that have significant connections to Montréal, such as The Gazette (Montréal’s most widely circulated English-language newspaper) and McGill-Queen’s University Press. Both of these institutions produce a lot of material that is read by a lot of people, and the standards they set are bound to be seen as somewhat authoritative.

But me, personally? Ai just don’t get it. For me, at least on one level, this isn’t even really political; it’s simply a matter of what looks good. Let’s consider the first sentence of the Wikipedia article about Projet Montréal for a moment: “Projet Montréal is a municipal political party in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.” If you’re going to add an accent to the first word that needs an accent, why the fuck wouldn’t you add accents to the second and third words? Again, it would be one thing if you were simply lazy and didn’t feel like adding the accents at all, perhaps because your keyboard isn’t set up to make it easy, perhaps because just fuck it. Ai see this all the time in bombastic National Post editorials that talk about “Rene Levesque” or whatever. But if you’re going to take the time to put an accent in one part of the sentence, why not just be consistent?

“Because,” you might be saying, “the accent indicates whether you’re supposedly to pronounce it in an English way or in a French way.”

Okay, fair enough, at least if we’re talking about Montréal – because, of course, this doesn’t apply to the name of the province. Whereas the French pronunciation of Montréal’s name is markedly different from the English pronunciation (notwithstanding the way that the narrator pronounces the name of the city in Street Politics 101, lol), the standard English pronunciation of Québec’s name is identical to the French pronunciation – at least around these parts. Ai’ve heard some Americans say KWI-bek rather than the proper KAY-bek, but hey, they’re Americans!

So yes, in the aforementioned sentence from Wikipedia, the “Montréal” in “Projet Montréal” is supposed to be pronounced mon-RAY-al (in rough phonetic English) and the “Montreal” in “Montreal, Quebec, Canada” is supposed to be pronounced MUN-tree-all (in precise phonetic English). One could definitely argue that the orthographic difference helps to make the difference in pronunciation more clear. But personally, ai feel like it isn’t really necessary, and it leads to some unnecessary ugliness. Maybe this is just me, but when ai read “Montréal” (accented) in an article, ai still pronounce it in my mind like MUN-tree-all. If ai see it next to a word like «projet», ai probably pronounce it differently. This is almost certainly because ai am a pretty word-based person, and because ai know more than a rudimentary bit of French, but ai also don’t think this would be hard to learn for most people. Ai certainly don’t think it would be hard for those pedantic Canadian anglophones who are actually very bilingual but nevertheless insist on an accentless orthography in English.

Now ai’m obviously coming from a place of simply thinking it looks nicer with an accent; in fact, ai like accents in general. Ai think they spice up a sentence, visually speaking. There are some who may say that this aesthetic predilection of mine is not shared by all, and shouldn’t be taken into consideration for design choices, especially when it makes the language somewhat more complicated to read aloud. Such folks are generally in favour of a more phonetic language. But ai don’t buy that shit. If we’re going to try to make written English and spoken English less divergent, there are much more important places to start than the name of this city. Hell, ai would even argue that it’s not such a bad thing for us to be constantly reminded that things don’t necessarily correspond perfectly between text and speech, and that it’s actually fine to be familiar with words in writing without being familiar with how they are actually pronounced. If you know where Shenzhen is on a map, you know that – and can even talk about it – whether you know how to pronounce the name of that city or not.

Ai used the example of a Chinese city in the last paragraph because the rules of Hanyu pinyin, which are actually very consistent and exist in order to make it very easy to pronounce Chinese words, are nevertheless quite non-intuitive for English-speakers who don’t know yet know those rules. Ai happen to be familiar with the rules of this pinyin, so ai can be all smug if ai want to be, but ai don’t consider myself familiar with how Kanien’kéha orthography relates to Kanien’kéha pronunciation. Like, in the word «Kanien’kéha» itself, ai have no idea what the apostrophe is supposed to represent. Ai am sure that it wouldn’t be too hard to learn, but at the moment, ai’m clueless. Nor do ai have any sense of what the colon in «Tioh:tiàke» is supposed to represent pronunciation-wise. For all ai know, these characters could have no impact on pronunciation whatsoever, and are instead there much like the accent aigu in the way ai spell the name of Montréal in English – in other words, there for decoration only. (Ai suspect that this is not the case, but again, ai’m clueless.)

Besides, toponyms seem to be an area of language where there is particular divergence between pronunciation and orthography. Did you know that the name of Kiribati, a country in the Pacific Ocean, is pronounced kee-REE-bus? Assuming you were somewhere in Beaver Empire last October and you were having any decent political conversations at all, did you have any idea about how to properly pronounce the name of Elsipogtog until you heard someone say it out loud to you?

But of course, Montréal is not like these places. It is different. There is, in fact, a narrative that it is a bilingual city, a city that is equally “English” and “French”. Thus, it should have a bilingual name. But again, ai don’t buy this shit. The original colonial settlement was entirely French, and while it later came under British sovereignty, it would have originally been referred to exclusively as “Montréal” – except perhaps by Americans, Englishpeople, and Scots who simply didn’t care to add the accent aigu. After conquest, buildings were built in Montréal that had an accentless MONTREAL engraved on them somewhere, along with other words in English – and ai can only interpret this as a sort of dickishness on the part of anglophones against francophones. Things are very different now from what it was like here in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, obviously, and the local power dynamic between francophone and anglophone has changed enormously. And yet this small, subtle dickishness is now seen as “only natural” by people who will add purely aesthetic accents elsewhere in sentences, as in: “Hey, can the two of us meet up at that cute little Parisian-style café in Old Montreal?”

Language is never natural. Language emerges from decisions that people make.

If we are to use a colonial name for this city at all – and, for the record, ai am open to the idea that we shouldn’t – then ai think it makes sense to just use a single name, to give up on this bilingual shit. The whole “two official languages” thing that the Liberals of the 1960s and ’70s implemented federation-wide is a vapid farce that, despite its total artificiality, has helped to keep the Canadian state together. We should therefore take objection to it.

The implication, for the name of Montréal, is that it doesn’t need two colonial names, one for each official language. It only has one colonial name. Whether you actually care to write that name out or not, ai don’t know. Again, if you’re lazy or you don’t have the right keyboard or you simply give no fucks, that’s all legit. Even if you buy my arguments but would like to keep writing out this city’s name without the accent because you think it’s funny to annoy people who give as much of a fuck about orthography as ai do, well, that’s legit too (though obviously you’re a brat). But if you DO care about writing it out properly, and you’re adding accents to things anyway, then you MAY AS FUCKING WELL add an accent to the name of the city. Ai kind of apply this logic to the Kanieh’kéha name as well. Both on my computer and on my phone, it’s pretty easy for me to add the accented letter (whether the ‘é’ or the ‘à’ in the words ai’ve used in this post), so ai’m gonna do it, cuz that’s how ai roll. Ai am less likely to go to the trouble, though, of using the right characters to spell a Polish or Vietnamese place name that has some intense diacritics going on, and that’s especially true if it’s for, like, a text message to a friend. Like, if ai want to speak about places like Łódź or Hải Phòng City and use the correct characters while doing so, ai pretty much need to copy and paste from Wikipedia.

In conclusion, please do you want, and please don’t feel like ai’m bossing you around. But if you’re making the decision to care about orthography, don’t be selective about it?