"Grumpy mama: My God! Don't you people have anything better to do?"

The fact of the matter is that we have plenty of things we have to do, must do, should have done, will do, and should do but we absolutely don't have anything BETTER to do .Hey, we are exercising our minds, twisting, spinning, turning them inside out and there is nothing morel exciting and fun to do in this whole world.

For my own part, I heard people mention a "thread" on the Internet but I have never been on one before. When I signed on, all I wanted to know was the difference between the French accent signs, acute and grave. And here I am, 2 hours later, , having read every single post going back to 2004 and enjoying myself immensely. I have also learned many fascinating things about words that I never knew before, the least of all being the difference between acute and grave.

There was one short post from about a year ago that I agreed with completely but I haven't seen anyone pick up on it. The writer pointed out that in the word resume/aka "what you hand in when you want a job"-----the first syllable consists of three letters , not two, i.e. res--uh--may and the "res" rhymes with the word "fez". When the word is being used in conversation, not even native French speakers would pronounce the first syllable to rhyme with "may". The tendency when speaking would be to concentrate on the consonants, not the vowels: thus, rez-(short "e")-uh(schwa)-may. This pronunciaiton follows the same principle that governs words like "resolute", "resonant", and "resurrection." When looked at this way, the first accent is irrelevant and serves no purpose but the accent on the final "e" tells the reader that the word is of French origin and thus the final letter----and syllable----a single "e" is pronounced like the sound of a long vowel "a" in English.

I don't recall ever seeing resume written with two accent marks; I have always written it with one. But the operative word here is "written". When I used it in letter writing, I wold put an accent over the final "e". Back in the day when I used a typewriter, I would add the accent with a pen after the document was completed. From all the posts I have read on this thread, I am beginning to think that the only reason "resume" with no accent came to be accepted as de rigeur for "the thing you hand in to get a job", is because it's a pain to do accents on a computer.

Let's keep this thread going----what the heck, we don't have anything better to do, right?