it always gives me something odd on the serial monitor instead of the symbol appearing in the IDE as it was cut and pasted from word lol
The serial monitor expects ASCII data, using single bytes for each character. Send it ASCII data. There are other code pages, that include the characters you want to see, but they are not necessarily supported by the Serial Monitor application.
Of course, the Serial Monitor application is not the only one that you can use to communicate with the Arduino. Find another application that lets you select the code page, and/or supports multi-byte characters, and use that instead.