Being a bilingual Canadian, I just wanted to try and stop the butchery of the French word Voilà
Necroposting in the highest possible order. Just bringing this back to life after seeing this word butchered some more in the last couple of days.
Voilà!
Kinda glad you did - I wasn't around here in 2014, but seeing this thread and the various responses prompted me to add my .02 - it is nice to see everyone's postings indicating that they care about proper use of the language (plus, although I'm an American, I have a soft spot in my heart for our neighbours across our northern border...LOL).
(for those wondering... it was Webster that 'Americanized' our language; until he did, US and English (Canadian) spellings were alike)
It's understandable not using the accent since most don't have a bilingual keyboard to be able to use it but it's the bad or incorrect words that are used that get to me:
- Wala or Waa laa: just from not being able to pronounce the "V" I guess, just sounds bad
- Viola: A misspell probably from using the auto correct, which is a stringed musical instrument
The first one annoys the living hell out of me, too - I see it often online (and for some reason, more often than not in auto forums? Or perhaps my searches are just naturally biased toward that end? lol)
AFAIK, there is no way to pronounce 'V' as 'W' in American English, so (younger) people here have *heard* the word, but never seen in in print, believe it or not. Ignorance is bliss. And then, there are those who simply don't care, but our primary / secondary education systems & practices are very different now than what they were when I was growing up. Especially our 'public' systems. Enough about that.
'Viola', besides people not caring about spelling, results again from not being visually aware of the word to even recognize something is amiss - and 'Voila' does not flag as a misspelled word in Chrome, at least - I can type it here in this message and see no prompting to change it - so I'll give the people who use 'Viola' a "half-credit" for trying (but still no cigar).
(on edit - see last comment at the bottom of this post - it actually *may* be a spelling correction - but the other way around - flagging 'correct' as 'incorrect'!)
As for the grave (accent mark) - supposedly, one can do that on a US English (Windows) keyboard by pressing 'Ctrl' plus the " ` ", *plus* the letter - but I find this impossible to do as I try it now, and I work in IT. The only way I can do it is to look it up in Windows' charmap utility - and, even then, I have to know the font family I'm using (which, on this site, I don't), as the ASCII code varies by font.
Given all of that, it's no wonder you don't see people using the grave too often on this side of the border (plus, except for professional writers, we're all 'lazy' and / or 'ignorant', as the stereotypes suggest.)
Where I'm going with this... how does Mooseman get the grave to appear correctly on his end? I've reviewed both the Canadian English and Canadian French layouts (Windows), and while the CA French version has the grave 'e'... I don't see the same for the 'a' or 'u'). So I'm guessing there must be some keyboard combo that must be entered to produce those - ? Which, to me is kind of nuts - why only the 'e' as a 'native' key (unless the 'a' and 'u' grave is rarely used in CA French - but then, we have " Voilà! ", which I would imagine is a commonly used word, so... ? (and, yes, I copied that from Mooseman's post)).
As an aside, since this is ostensibly what this thread is about... pasting the 'correct' version of the word above... Chrome flagged it, and suggested 'Voile' or 'Voila' (no grave) - I kid you not! Go figure!
