My “á”

The importance of the properly punctuating my last name was stressed into me as a young child by my mother. As she would take any opportunity to label all my possessions with from lunch boxes to pencil bags with a piece of masking tape reading “Benjamin Hernández”. So it should come as no surprise that as an adult I have grown accustomed to including that all-important accent when signing or writing my name. Once I even going as far as once correcting a professor’s roll-sheet as it was passed around. I discovered when it came to the web, in many cases it using that “á” created some problems resulting in several different flavors of “Hernández” including “HernÅndez” and “Hern&%ndez”. I soon memorized it’s HTML code counterpart: &aacute; .

For a while this appeared to (I thought) take care of the issues, then when I started working at ArtWorks I made the mistake of properly punctuating my last name on an online application, effectively hiding any record of Benjamin Hernandez (no accent) and only showing Benjamin Hernández under their employ. Eventually it was figured out what the problem and most my records were changed to reflect the Tex-Mex edition of my last name, but I’m still missing from a lot of directories, at least the me sans accent is. Kind of an interesting problem.

It poses a good question. How is this handled in other countries where English is not the mother tongue? What would poor Tobias Bade Strøm to do when typing his name to create a new foursquare account? Apple seems to have figured it out, making it easy on its iOS products to add these proper punctuation’s, even including an “on-the-fly” keyboard language switcher. I can only hope that one day I live in a world we are all free to punctuate freely and correctly, no matter the medium. Until then I’ll keep accenting my á’s, “tildeing” my ñ’s, “diaeresising” my ü’s, and memorizing HTML codes.