Talking about language

English borrowed la tilde and shrank it. In English a tilde is the wave over the <b>ñ</b> and nothing else; in Spanish la tilde is the accent stroke on any vowel — árbol, café, según — and it is what the whole system of stress rules is about. The wave has a name of its own, la virgulilla, and hardly anybody uses it. So lleva tilde means « it takes an accent », a remark about spelling and not about <b>ñ</b>, and la tilde diacrítica is the stroke that keeps two identical words apart, as in tú and tu.