I Go Godzilla Over Garcon’s Cedilla

I have a bone to pick with someone, but I’m not exactly sure who. It might be Pierre Garcon, second-year wide receiver for the Indianapolis Colts, enjoying a breakout season.

It might be the Colts, and it might be the NFL. The thing that gets me is the cedilla, the little squiggly under the c in Garcon’s name that’s on his uniform. It signifies that Garcon’s name is pronounced “gar-son” instead of “gar-kon.” On the one hand, Garcon’s family is from Haiti, where French is spoken. I didn’t know Garcon’s family was from Haiti before starting to write this post. On the other hand, Pierre was born and raised in Carmel, New York. Shouldn’t he write his name using American English (like he does on his website)? On yet another hand, this is America, where we speak English, which doesn’t use the cedilla for a soft c. On yet another hand, English steals lots of words from other languages, why not steal the diacritical marks as well? On yet another hand, isn’t it polite to address people in speech and writing by the way they wish to be addressed?

It should also be noted that the letter C on Garcon’s uniform is misaligned with the other letters in his name. The bottom of the cedilla is on the same line as the bottom of the other letters. Now I want to know whose idea it was to make the uniform that way.

I’m interested as to where the cedilla is and isn’t regarding Garcon’s internet presence. For example, it is nowhere to be found at the Garcon page at the Colts website. It is in abundance at the Garcon Wikipedia page. It is not at Pierre Garcon’s website.

I haven’t been able to find any instances of this, but I’ve been told that there have been NFL players with tildes over n’s in the name on the back of the uniform. This is a long established practice in Major League Baseball, dating back to 1972, when Houston Astro Cesar Cedeno asked for a tilde on his uniform after a breakout season. A Vietnamese speaker told me that if the name of former Dallas Cowboys linebacker Dat Nguyen was written in Vietnamese, it would have a dot under the a, and a carot over the e. I don’t remember seeing that on his uniform. So while diacritical marks are not used in standard American English usage, it would seem that the NFL and MLB have agreed in principle to diacritical marks on the names on back of uniforms. I don’t like this arrangement, because even if the players don’t come from America, they play in America, and America pays their salaries. You would think they could stand to use American writing on the backs of their uniforms. On the other hand, the presence or absence of a tilde changes the meaning of a name. For example, peña means rock, but pena means pain. Año means year, but ano means anus. So the MLB tilde’s and Garcon’s cedilla convey both pronunciation information and more subtle significances.

Who knows, maybe it would be a useful innovation to the English language to use a cedilla to signify a soft c. Who knows, maybe the non-American-English diacriticals in uniform names of the NFL and MLB, instead of an insult to American English, is part of the evolution of our species from a collection of warring tribes to a unified human race.

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