Dearest Mercury peers: As a learnèd, renowned philologist, my loving embrace of the diaeresis often prompts many an eye-roll. Perhaps I am but a naïve curmudgeon, clinging to vestiges of the past, but better this than slumming it with the literary hoi polloi! Engulfed in my nightly musings, without exception, I find myself in a zone of wondrous phantasmagoria, fluid thoughts racing to the page through my fingertips, a strange miasma of color and sound engulfing me, letters and words bantering, articulate nebbishes, my dearest Chloë shouting out desperately, “I am not a diphthong!” Omitting necessary trema where required, or deigning to substitute a lowly hyphen, would be anathema to my core aesthetic and fill me with unbearable horror and nausea, as if a poisonously banal verse of Nickleback had been inserted into the complex, symphonic beauty of a John Zorn diatribe! Yet in the spirit of coöperation, lest I be mistaken for merely a pedestrian pedant, or insecure hipster failing to ironize correctly (as is so often the case!), I’ve been reëvaluating my noble stance, my doggèd insistence on preserving the beauty of the past as only a zealous steampunk aficionado might appreciäte, and in the midst of deep contemplation, almost succumbing to the slow pejoration of our beautiful English language, alas quite another emotion sprang forth, reïgniting my commitment to truth as it reëntered my consciousness, reässerting its dominance, the mighty fury of... mom! no!! no onions! jeez!!