Preface To Cafés: Accent Aigu

Here's something I probably knew before but wouldn't have known if you just asked me: in French, the accent aigu (the little accent mark that tilts up from the left) is only used on the letter e.  You'll see its opposite, the accent grave, on other vowels, including e, but the accent aigu is only used - in French, mind you - on the letter e.

Wow, I can hear you thinking to my face, what an unbelievably minor piece of trivia.  I agree - but it is something I would think I thought I knew.  In fact, if you had asked me about that diacritical mark, I would've spelled it accent ague, & lost the spelling bee again like I did in the fifth grade.

But you know why I'm thinking about it.  I'm wondering if it's more proper to spell this week's theme café or cafe.

The internet (& online dictionaries) say both are acceptable - & strangely without much fuss.  This discussion on wordreference dot com doesn't even end with someone being called a Nazi!  Etymologists are chumps.

For the purposes of this show, I've found also that songs about "cafes" (or "cafés") don't adhere to any set rule per genre or age of song.  While poking around for the origin of some song or other, I found it as both cafe & café.  Who knows what the composer intended?  Does it matter?

A search of local (for me, Fort Worth-area) cafes (or cafés) demonstrates a clear disinterest in the Frenchified version.  West Side Cafe, Twin Creeks Cafe (which is inside a Honda dealership), Press Cafe, Vickery Cafe, & Benbrook Cafe (to name a few) all happily avoid the accent aigu.  In fact, the only one I could find in the city that uses the accent is (of course) in an art museum.

One thing to note is that most of these places are eateries of a sort that the strict definition of the word "café" (or "cafe") doesn't support; the strict definition of café (or cafe) is much synonymous with "coffeehouse" than "restaurant."  So perhaps the losing of the accent mark is a deliberate gesture, a kind of offhanded rejection of the roots of the word, the European café?  I can't know & of course I am overthinking it.

What will Self Help Radio do?  When you see the playlist, you'll discover that I'll just go with whatever the tracklistings say.  But when I say the word, I am definitely saying it like this: café.