You think you know somebody, and then something so odd, so strange, just leaps up at you, and you wonder. You wonder, “how is it that I never knew that about you?” Just now, I’ve been sitting here with TadMack as she’s finishing up a story, before we go out to look at more kitchen things (granite countertops, today), and she needed to write the word “über.” With the umlaut. Now, for me to write that? I’d have to pull up the character map (charmap.exe – you’ve got it if you’ve got Windows). For her? She holds down the Alt key and uses the number keypad to type 0252. Without looking. Without even thinking about it. Try it: press Alt+0252. You get:
ü
I’ll bet she knows all of the accented French ones, too, and probably the Spanish one (ñ). After all, how many times do you need the ü character, as opposed to the é or the ñ characters?
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