â in error messages, terminal, etc...?

â was popping up on my shell all over the place.

The problem was that the locale was set incorrectly.

# printenv |grep LANG
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

LANG needs to be set to en_US not en_US.UTF-8. See your disto's documentation on how to do that. For gentoo, see below.

resetting LANG local variable in gentoo

show current locale setting

# eselect locale list |grep *$
[786] en_US.UTF-8 *

show en_US local number

# eselect locale list |grep "en_US "
 [230] en_US

set locale to en_US

#  eselect locale set 230
Setting LANG to en_US ...
Run ". /etc/profile" to update the variable in your shell.