1) what a hilarious thread!
2) thank you to fancy_dave who said, on February 7, 2005: "The punctuation marks on top of the letter 'e' in French are for pronunciation, not for 'accenting' the sound ...." and thereby cleared up the ridiculousness of mistaking French accent marks for "stress" marks.
3) thank you as well to speedwell2, who said, on June 25, 2004: " ... I should add that in most of the US the unaccented form is preferred; the accented form is thought of as a sort of affected overcorrectness."