Dieresis in a sentence as a noun

NuänceOT: the 'ua' here is not a dipthong, so a dieresis is out of place.

The New Yorker is precisely where I saw & adopted the dieresis way back when.

The New Yorker's house style is to use a dieresis to indicate when adjacent vowels do not form a diphthong.

_coördinating_Completely, unabashedly unrelated, but I honestly can't remember the last time I saw dieresis in the wild.

As an undergrad, thanks to TeX making the dieresis readily accessible, I was fond of its use. I remember someone commenting that my writing "coördinates" with a dieresis made him want to pronounce it as if he were Inspector Clouseau.

I think it irritates me for the same reason I get irritated by American English speakers calling soccer “football”, or by people using a dieresis when writing “coördinate”.Basically, it’s rare enough that it doesn’t sound natural and therefore comes off to me as an affectation, and makes the person sound weirdly smug about being “technically correct”.I really should get over it, but like I said, not really rational.

Dieresis definitions

noun

a diacritical mark (two dots) placed over a vowel in German to indicate a change in sound

See also: umlaut diaeresis