22 March 2024

Metal umlauts


I've seen them for years but never thought to read about them until the term appeared in a recent NYT crossword puzzle.  Here's a summary from Wikipedia:
A metal umlaut (also known as röck döts) is a diacritic that is sometimes used gratuitously or decoratively over letters in the names of mainly hard rock or heavy metal bands—for example, those of Blue Öyster Cult, Queensrÿche, Motörhead, the Accüsed, Mötley Crüe and the parody bands Spın̈al Tap and Green Jellÿ...

Among English speakers, the use of umlaut marks and other diacritics with a blackletter typeface is a form of foreign branding, which has been attributed to a desire for a "gothic horror" feel. The metal umlaut is not generally intended to affect the pronunciation of the band's name.
As Vince Neil recounts: "I can remember it like it was yesterday. We were drinking Löwenbräu, and when we decided to call ourselves Mötley Crüe, we put some umlauts in there because we thought it made us look European. We had no idea that it was a pronunciation thing. When we finally went to Germany, the crowds were chanting, 'Mutley Cruh! Mutley Cruh!' We couldn’t figure out why the fuck they were doing that."

1 comment:

  1. For those unaware: the genuine Umlaut (basically "sound changer" in German) modifies the pronunciation of a vowel: a sounds like "ah", ä sounds like "eh", etc. Instead of ä you can also write ae: the two dots used to be the letter e on top of the vowel, which looked like two vertical lines in German cursive script.

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