mcgrew's Journal: We've been spelling it wrong for over a quarter century

I'm surprised that this hasn't been addressed by the academic communities. Someone with a degree in English or linguistics or something like that should have though of this decades ago.

This word (actually more than one word) has various spellings, and I've probably used all of them at one time or another. The word is email, or eMail, or e-mail, or some other variation. They're all wrong.

It's a contraction of "electronic mail" and as such should be spelled e'mail. The same with e'books and other e'words.

So why hasn't someone with a PhD in English pointed this out to me? I have no formal collegiate training in this field. It's a mystery to me.

Is today Tuesday?

[BarbaraHudson]

In keeping with Ithe common practice in the computer field (18N for internationalization, etc)., electronic mail should be written e9mail. :-). Or for the really lazy, e12l.

Bye-bye is valid english. Would you want to write that as b'bye? It's bad enough that jerks changed sci-fi to syfy. (and you wouldn't want to call it s'fi, would you?)

Re:

[mcgrew]

Well, when a child says bye-bye, it sounds like a contraction (b'bye), but bye-bye is not a contraction. It's more like Cory Doctorow spells sidewalk: side-walk. Wnat contraction uses a hyphen instead of an apostrophe? Not bye-bye, it isn't a contraction of anything.

As to "SyFy", that's a trademark, not a word. It only applies to that bad cable channel. Hi-fi and sci-fi aren't contractions of high fidelity and science fiction, but new words made out of old ones.

I guess that could argue the validity of e-mai

Re:

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

G'day has always been the rendering - since at least Regency times, when t'was spoken aloud as such. ;-)

Re:

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Yeah. Like I'd ever be caught DEAD or ALIVE in Arizona. Life is too short for that.

Keeping it simple.

[westlake]

They're all wrong.

The apostrophe in e'mail is a roadblock you stumble over in confusion.

It's so much easier to scan and pronounce "e-mail" and the meaning remains clear.

Re:

[Captain Splendid]

Was gonna say pretty much the same thing. Sometimes, being technically correct means its godawful and should be shunned. Something a lot of slashdotters still don't appreciate...