>>>The word accent has more than one meaning, in both English and French. And the word 'accent' is spelled the same in both languages. And the accented letter that I am talking about has nothing to do with the stress. Hence the title of the thread is not accurate: accent could be how you write and not how you say.
>>>But you know that; you just like to talk to me :)
>>
>>How long are you in the US now? I'd expect that, for you, the primary meaning of the word is "small but visually attractive element of interior decoration".
>
>In Spanish, the word 'tilde' means a written accent placed over a letter. Any written accent. Which confuses a lot of people since the word 'tilde' also means the tilde, a type of mark placed over a letter N.
>Could it be that the word 'accent' confuses you in the same way? :)

I'm not confused at all. It's the misuse of the word accent to mean a diacritic. There's already a perfectly good word for it, and using another word which has a somewhat related but a categorically different meaning (one is from typography, other from phonology) is what creates confusion.

In école - where's the accent?