I’m so tired of seeing grammar books suggest the usage “E-mail”. Many of these books argue that “e-mail” stands for electronic mail and necessitates a hyphen. They are wrong.
To say that email stands for electronic mail is akin to saying that automobile stands for automatic mobile. Certainly, automobile probably originated by combining automatic and mobile, but it is now a word of its own. Email has also become a word of its own, and I would argue that “e” has become a common prefix much like “auto.”
Google Trends is an excellent tool for showing how real people use words.
If we look at e-mail vs. email, we clearly see people use email when searching. Now, some might be quick to argue that search users are lazy and type the shortest possible input, but that hypothesis can easily be disproved by looking at t-shirt vs. tshirt. “T-shirt” wins, showing that search users aren’t inherently against using the hyphen in a search term.
Other Grammar Book Errors
Take a look at Web site vs. website. The argument grammar books make here is that Web site stands for World Wide Web site. However, they are incorrect. You can easily have a website that exists outside of the World Wide Web. An intranet is an excellent example. I can even have webpages if not complete websites on my local computer. Does a Web page become an HTML document when it no longer resides on the World Wide Web?
Those “Damn” Quotes … and Parenthesis
Any grammar book will tell you that punctuation goes inside the quote. And they are correct when referring to the limited ways that they use quotes. However, the rise of the internet and computers has added additional usage for the quotes. For instance, I may want to communicate a specific search term like “punctuation inside the quote”. If I put the punctuation inside of the quote like so “punctuations inside the quote.”, it changes the meaning of what I was trying to convey.
Confused? Take a look at a programming example. For instance, I may want to communicate the PHP code like “echo ‘hello world’;”. Clearly if I were to put the period inside of the quote “echo ‘hello world’;.” and someone was to try using that code, it would no longer work.
Grammar books don’t make grammar rules; populations do. In the past, language changed much more slowly, or at least, our ability to track changes in language was slow. However, that is no longer the case. So, next time you go to use “E-mail” just because it’s in a grammar book, be wary because you probably mean “email”.
October 25th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
Actually, yes, people make grammar rules–people who write grammar books. No split infinitives? Don’t end a sentence with a preposition? These were one man’s opinion–he was trying to make English more like Latin. Bishop Lowth (the guy with a grudge against sentence-final prepositions) actually took negative examples from Shakespeare, the KJV, Donne, Milton, Swift &c. Check it out:
University of Oregon
Wikipedia (Bishop Lowth)
This site gives a difference between those type of grammar books and how most linguists (including me) are trained today:Rutgers.
And a final note of interest: the Email Experience Council, self-appointed regulatory agency of “email” marketing, announced that the spelling of the word is, officially, “email.” But most of the columnists on the council are forced to use “e-mail” in their columns because their publishers adhere to the AP Stylebook. It’s not a grammar guide–it’s just to make sure you don’t see email, e-mail, eMail and electronic mail all in the same article.
In other languages (French especially and Spanish to a lesser extent) there are regulatory committees that say whether or not a word is “French.” Personally, while that is a nice excuse, I’m glad we don’t have one in English.
Oh, and I prefer e-mail and website, oddly enough. Totally agree on the quotation marks–but technically speaking the last period belongs inside the quotation marks
.
November 18th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
Your e-mail vs. t-shirt argument is a bit weak. The ‘e’ in e-mail is a vowel and it would be more appropriate to use the hyphen to avoid making a ‘new’ word… And yes sorry to inform you, e-mail does stand for electronic mail. Those of you who were around before the “late 90’s internet” nonsense started know better.
What gets me is people who use e-mail like this: “I have to check my e-mails.” You don’t say “I have to check the mailbox on the street for my mails.” Lose the ’s’ people. The same goes for “send me an e-mail.” Send you a mail? Huh?? And don’t let me catch you saying “I’ll shoot you an e-mail!” cause that’s just wrong!
P.S. Everytime I “check my e-mail,” it’s still there, right where I left it. I don’t know what people are so concerned about. I do ‘check my e-mail box’ or ‘check for messages’ sometimes…
April 22nd, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Does it matter?
May 4th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
lol, i agree with Kara. does it matter? and also if you have enough time to write somthing like this, then you must be a really boring person, lol
September 23rd, 2007 at 10:20 pm
I probably am a really boring person, BUT I did get you to take the time to read it, Harvey. Does it matter no? But really what does matter. I love this post.