Cedilla

How does one Google an accent mark when one doesn’t know it’s name.  Try putting in “little squiggly below a c” and see how far it gets you.  When I began writing yesterday’s post on soupçon, this was exactly the issue I faced.  So what does this mean? According to the O.E.D. it was a mark derived from the letter z used in French, Portuguese, and formerly Spanish.  It is used to soften the c in front of vowels that would often call for a hard sound.

Although the Spanish no longer use it, it seems to be a Spanish word.  It comes from zedilla, as in a little zeda (the letter z).

It is also used in Turkish, but don’t ask me how.

Soupçon

The word means a very small quantity of something, and I never saw it before reading Bob Sloan’s mystery, Bliss Jumps the Gun.  Since then, I’ve seen it several times.  It is a French word and pronounced Soop-sawn because of the little cedilla below the c.  It took me damn forever to figure out how to put that into the text box.

I tried to find the value of this word, why someone would use it instead of, let’s say, iota.  The O.E.D. had an interesting take.  The define soupçon as a suspicion or suggestion of something.  How poetic.  While an iota may be a small amount, a soupçon is so minuscule that it is not even visible, merely the slight hint of its existence is left.