Wikipedia:Today's featured article/June 26, 2004

A heavy metal umlaut is an umlaut over some of the letters in the names of a heavy metal band—although the names will then sound very silly to people who use languages in which umlauts are common, such as German, Turkish or Swedish. Umlauts are often used in concert with a Blackletter or pseudo-Blackletter typeface in the band logo to give it a more gothic feel. The original use of gratuitous diacritical marks appears to have been by the Blue Öyster Cult in 1971; Motörhead and Mötley Crüe then followed. Spoof band Spinal Tap parodied the idea still further in 1982 by putting the umlaut over the letter n, which does not belong to any standard character set. (more...)

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