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"e-mail" vs "email"
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Oct 23, 2000 08:14 AM
from the what-with-global-warming-and-all dept.
from the what-with-global-warming-and-all dept.
wiredog points us to a Wired article talking about a debate at least as critical as the race for U.S. president: e-mail vs email. Well? Which is it? Personally I'm too lazy to care about the proper use of homonyms, much less type an extra hyphen.
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"e-mail" vs "email"
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Re:More importantly: email is a PLURAL NOUN (Score:3)
HOWEVER, how many new words and rules have surfaced because of new technology rapidly coming into mainstream use?
The general population uses this word as a singular, and it's not like it's a centuries-old word that is suddenly being grossly distorted.
Personally, i think whether you use the dash or not or if you use it as a singular noun or not, it shouldn't be THAT big of an issue.
It's still all relatively new language that is evolving in the English language every day.
Maybe they'll end up being technically incorrect (like "i'm going to send my friend an email") but how many 'rules' are there in the english language that don't have exceptions?
Re:The difinitive answer? (Score:4)
I gave up reading the article after the first page. Wired really tires me out with it's constant use of buzzwords like "Digirati" and the like.
Yes, maybe I should have finished the article before posting my comment. As far as "Wired Style" goes, maybe I was wrong. I got that book for Christmas a few years back when I was still working as a Journalist with the U.S. Navy.
This is the kind of article on slashdot where very few people are actually going to take the time to read the article. Personal opinions on this matter are more important then what Wired says about it anyway.
However, because this is true, I should have made doubly sure to be factually acurate in my comment. I went by memory (because my copy of 'Wired Style' is 40 miles away and hidden among a stack of hundreds of books in the top of my bedroom closet.
Actually, I have wanted for a while to get a new copy of the "Associated Press Stylebook". I haven't seen a copy since the 1994 edition and I would like to see how it has delt with many of the terms that have become so popular due to the internet over the last few years.
e'mail would not work as a contraction. Contractions follow the style of using the complete first word and than adding an apostrophe and a contracted form of the last word. Therefore electronic'l would be a more correct contracted form.
"E-mail" works. I prefer email and I prefer it as a new word. We are on the virge of a new emerging evolution of the English language. English has always been an evolving language, a language that changes to meet the needs of the people who are speeking it. This is why there are so many differences in proper English, Austrailian English, American English and the various dialects (southern English is definately different from Northern.)
Read a copy of "Beowulf" in the original tongue. Old English is barely recognizable to us today. Then read a few passages from the King James Bible of 1611. The language of the "King's English" is also remote to us (though easy to interpret.) Now read a copy of "Grapes of Wrath" and you will see that even this book, which is less than 100 years old, uses language that at times seems a bit odd. Now read "Snowcrash" and you will be reading something that seems modern to us.
It won't be long before our language accepts the new terminology into it's vernacular as new words and not contractions of two seperate words. E-mail will become email. And little children who see the book "Charlotte's Web" sitting on the shelf will assume first that it is a book about technology.
Yes, I prefer 'email'. it is simpler. Almost elegant. It is forward-looking. E-mail makes you think of a letter sent electronically. But email is word that is open and transcends the old concepts of mail.
More importantly: email is a PLURAL NOUN (Score:5)
Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck. The noun 'email' is plural, and should be used exactly the same way as the plural noun 'mail'. You check your email, you send a piece of email, you send some email if you insist on a shorter way of saying the previous. This used to be standard usage before about 1993 or so (see Sep tem ber that never ended [tuxedo.org]), but sadly seems to be the minority usage now.
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Both are correct (Score:3)
Re:Standard english rules (Score:3)
my friends mom (Score:5)
"I got a ton of "E" today...
You rollin?
Both terms are wrong. (Score:5)
Re:my friends mom (Score:3)
I laughed hard at the joke. I'm not some uptight easily-offended baby like a lot of
<Rant>
Ecstasy is dangerous shit.
Besides the immediate side effects (dehydration, high blood pressure, etc), E has a lot of long-term effects that have not been studied in any depth. Some serotonin receptors in your brain are damaged every time you use it -- they're overloaded by the sudden release of serotonin and just give up. Yeah, everyone knows about "terrible tuesdays" and the recovery time after you come down from E, but sometimes it can take weeks for your brain to re-manufacture more serotonin.
Do some reading: http://come.to/ecstasy. I urge you. My best friend died this summer during his third experience with ecstasy. He was a computer geek studying biomedical engineering... slashdot material. The people that are hurt by this stuff aren't people you don't know in clubs far away -- they're you and me and our friends.
Party safely.
</rant>
-Chris
FSF recommendation: (Score:4)
The difinitive answer? (Score:3)
A remark from Don Knuth on the subject.. (Score:5)
I find this note from Don Knuth enlightning:
A note on email versus e-mail
Btw, "Micro-soft" had a hyphen too..
__________________________________________
The really important question (Score:4)
Cowboy Neal (Score:5)
Post this as a poll. You could probably do the same with some of the lameness that gets foisted on us in Ask Slashdot, too.
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Is this really necessary? (Score:3)
This morning I start up my browser and see an article which is asking how to spell a word???????
Come on, guys. Either get some consistency with your editorial selections, or you will eventually start to lose that portion of your readership which may be influential and have real decision-making powers.
Jonathan Bayer, Director of Technology at Dynamic Logic
Standard english rules (Score:5)
The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th Ed., on p. 203, says:
"A closed (or solid) compound is a combination of two or more elements, originally separate words, now spelled as one word. Examples: henhouse, typesetting, makeup, notebook."
Thus 'typesetting' probably began as 'type setting', and then moved to 'type-setting', and finally became 'typesetting.'
The path for 'email' was 'electronic mail', 'electronic-mail', 'e-mail', and finally 'email'.
One rule, when in doubt, is to check an unabridged (recent) dictionary. If a word has progressed to the closed compound stage, it will be in the dictionary without the hyphen, and that would mean it is now valid to use it that way.
________________
Re:It's email. (Score:3)
Precisely. It was never "electronic-mail", although it was once "electronic mail". Wired News, according to the article, didn't even appear until 1996. I'd already been using email (without a hyphen) for nearly a decade by then. A brief look at history would have told them that it was only marketing departments that ever used e-mail. The rest of us were quite happily communicating using email...
ObPedant: Of course, it should probably be "e'mail" if we're being picky about it...
email, e-mail... (Score:3)
Ironic (Score:3)
EMail
Search engines will answer your question. (Score:5)
I use Google.
email [google.com] - 55,000,000 pages.
e-mail [google.com] - 3,560,000 pages.