The Washington Post is dropping the hyphen from e-mail . Bill Walsh, who calls himself “the keeper, more or less, of The Post’s style manual,” isn’t happy about having to make the change. I find his reasoning sound:
While it’s true that commonly used two-word or hyphenated compounds often solidify into single words over time, that had never before happened with a compound based on a single letter. We had T-shirts and X-rays for a long time before electronic mail showed up, but we still aren’t writing about tshirts and xrays .I started walking through the alphabet: A- and B-list , C-clamp , D-Day , F-hole , G-spot, H-bomb. And, of course, e- words, all hyphenated: e-book , e-commerce , e-reader , e-tail , e-zine . Keeping the hyphen in e-mail seems a logical choice.
For whatever reason, though, e-mail quickly became email as America went online.
The title of the most popular post on this blog, How to e-mail a professor, has always had a hyphen. It’s old school.
Related posts
Bad hyphens, unhelpful abbreviations : “Every generation hyphenates the way it wants to” : Got hyphens? : The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem : Living on hyphens : Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner : One more from Mr. Hyphen : Phrasal-adjective punctuation
[Mr. Hyphen: protagonist of Edward N. Teall’s Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place) (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1937), the subject of several of these hyphen-centric posts.]
I am also staying with the hyphen, but I fear it won't be long now. I was convinced by your list until I picked up where you left off: iTunes, JSTOR, Kmart, and (I know this one doesn't count) llama.
ReplyDeleteI couldn’t think of anything for i , hyphen or no hyphen. But the Apple names aren’t really words created in the wild; they don’t have to follow any rules. (Nor do MacBook and all camel-cased product names.) I always assumed JSTOR was an acronym, since it looks like one. But as I just found out, it stands for Journal Storage . Kmart used to have a hyphen. I still spell Wal-Mart (if I have to) with a hyphen. Maybe I should start spelling iPhone with a hyphen. :)
ReplyDelete"E" (and to an extent "i") has become a prefix, one that represents not an abbreviation (like G-spot) or a reference to a letter-shape (F-hole) but an actual semantic addition to a word, the way that "un-" does in "unforgettable." So you can make up new words like "ecard," "e-commerce," etc., with or without using a hyphen, and we understand immediately what the modification implies. ("Etail" is a special case, because there we drop the original initial consonant.) There may be a case for preserving the hyphen where clarity is an issue, but in the long run it's probably going to disappear.
ReplyDeleteDidn’t the e begin as a stand-in for electronic?
ReplyDeleteIn 2009 Garner’s Modern American Usage found e-mail “five times as common as email” in print. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–2012) has e-mail as far more common. But I too suspect that the hyphen may disappear.
It did begin as "electronic" (at least I assume it did), but I think it now simply functions as a marker for "things web-related," since the "electronic" aspect of our lives is now taken for granted. I suspect future generations, if they still use it, will have little awareness of the "electronic" origin.
ReplyDeleteAnd there's the name "eBay" as a model — even though that was apparently originally a shortened form of "Echo Bay."
Now I see what you mean.
ReplyDeleteI just did some looking: in 1998 the American Dialect Society called e- a “hyphenated prefix” and voted it “Word (or perhaps Lexical Entry) of the Year.”
“Now I see what you mean”: in other words, what you first wrote. I missed the importance of become .
ReplyDeleteHm. A random thought: maybe the meaning of the prefix "e" will expand to mean anything web related...
ReplyDeleteSo, for instance "eirritating" could mean something that annoys you on the Internet.
That sounds einteresting!
ReplyDelete