This post is brought to you by the letter K and the umlaut

When I told my mother Matt Fraction had used my name as the inspiration for a villain 's name she wanted to know why it could not have been a hero. I told her it was because spelling words with a "k" where you could use a "c" means EVIL for two reasons. First, Germany and World War Two: Germans spell cognates with "k"s instead of "c"s. I have to admit there does seem to be something slightly sinister about "Sokrates," and the Jewish Kirby surely felt this when he named the home of Dark Side "Apokolips" -- a word that carries bad connotations even without the K. The second reason is the Ku Klux Klan (and I will not tell you how late in life I discovered that this was not spelled "Klu Klux Klan" -- about a week after I discovered that "Juke-box" is not spelled "Jute-Box" [EDIT: backwards in the original post]: the first time I think I ever saw the word written down was in V For Vendetta of all things). Fraction's "Dokkkor" is surely bad news, and you do not need a context to tell you that anyone spelling "America" as "Amerikkka" is not writing an encomium.

The real proof for my mother that Doctor Klock has to be a villain -- a camp one to be sure, but still - came from the adult swim metal-parody/tribute cartoon Metalocalypse (not Metalokalypse, which is surely going to far). The metal band around which the show revolves is called Dethklok -- because Death-Clock lacks that vaguely Tough-German sounding edge that most Metal bands get by putting nonsensical umlauts over vowels. Spinal Tap is a great example of the pointless umlaut -- hilariously jacking up the stupidity of metal's appropriation of the mark by placing it over a consonant.



Sidenote One: dieresis

Because a lot of people do not know this: the umlaut is a guide to how to pronounce a vowel and is not an English mark; we do have a rarely used mark in English that looks just like an umlaut, but it is called a dieresis, and is used to tell you that two uncomfortably close vowels are meant to be pronounced separately: without the dieresis over the second "o" "coop" is a place to keep birds, rather than an apartment complex where people own their own apartments, as Omar from the Wire will tell you. The New Yorker is the only publication I can think of that still includes the dieresis as part of their style guide.

Sidenote 2: Klockblocked

The inspiration for this post was discovering that a recent Metalocalypse episode is called "Klokblocked" -- which the AV Club reviewer wonderfully misspelled "Klockblocked." From here on out this is my new favorite expression, for obvious reasons, and I will continue to think on ways to work it into everyday conversation and blog comments.