We edit and write in British English, here at The National, in Abu Dhabi. Which can be tricky. And sometimes annoying.

But the newspaper made one decision back before the launch, in April of 2008, that is brilliant.

No diacritical marks. Ever.

Expedient? You bet.

Sensible? Absolutely.

Hence, none of this in our pages:

â ø ï ñ

Or …

ã ç è ö

You have never lived until you’ve been going over a piece of copy with the names of a bunch of European soccer players, say, and trying to figure out — on deadline — which letters need a tilde or an umlaut or some other goofy slash/squiggle/cap.

The New York Times, being upmarket, and all, tends to use some or all of these.

I recall jamming them into text while reading sports during the winter I spent in Hong Kong working at the International Herald Tribune, which used NYT style.

I still have nightmares about them. Well, they are abating, given it was 2008-09. But anyway …

So, if we are doing a story about Barcelona and Real Madrid, and the author has referred to Fabio Coentrao or Raphael Varane of Real or Jeremy Mathieu or Ivan Rakitic of Barca … we don’t have to go in there and turn it into … Fábio Coentrão and Raphaël Varane of Real and Jérémy Mathieu and Ivan Rakitic’ of Barça.

This makes perfect sense. English speakers either know how to pronounce the names of famous players or they do not, and they are not going to be able to figure out the values of diacritical remarks in a batch of languages.

So why not just put out the letters and let it go?

That’s what we do. Thank goodness.