Resurrecting the Ñ   

SLOPPY OR CARELESS foreign language spelling is a common beef among reporters and readers--and it should be. At the Los Angeles Times, for example, every copy desk has a special Spanish-English reference book on grammar and usage. Nevertheless, the poor, misunderstood enye, the letter ñ, was customarily killed by copy editors (only El Niño was exempt) because it was considered too much trouble to enter that extra couple of keystrokes.

"An unfortunate lazy habit," says the Times' associate editor, Frank del Olmo. "Really, it was more of a technical issue. We're working our way into a new pagination system, and it's difficult to get the enye in there."

Difficult at the expense of sources, who were frequently humiliated by that ban. Without the ñ, the common surname Peña becomes Pena, a word which can mean penalty, embarrassment, shame, sadness, worry, hardship or toil--depending on how it's used. But it's never good. You get the idea.

What was arguably the most regrettable instance of the Times'all but zero enye tolerance was what happened to staff writer Nancy Cleeland's November 20, 1999, story about a hopeful in the "Senorita [sic] Zacatecas" beauty pageant. (No, it wasn't the misspelling of Señorita, though that too was bad.) Quoting the teenager Emir Estrada talking to the contest audience, the copy read: " 'Mi nombre es Emir Estrada. Tengo 18 anos de edad.'My name is Emir Estrada. I am 18 years old."

Wrong! Missing its ñ, the word anos means, um, anuses. The L.A. Weekly had a field day. Its story's headline was "An Asshole by Any Other Name."

So in April, when new Editor John Carroll had been at the Times all of four days, del Olmo and Team Latino met with him to discuss Problema Enye. "I told John it would be like saying Johnston is now Johnson because our style is not to use the t," del Olmo says. "You can't do that to people. It's either correct or it isn't."

Carroll approved the enye.

Says del Olmo, "It's a good symbolic gesture on John's part."