In the earlier post I wrote on the email/e-mail debate, I claimed that, were I backed into a corner, I would favor the unhyphenated version. However, today I was writing my comps paper (on speaker choice in the needs doing alternation), and found myself typing the word “e-mail” into the paper. It just felt right in that situation. And that’s why I don’t want to be tied down to just one form or the other; sometimes the dispreferred form is just better for a given task.
I’m bringing this up not to bore you with the details of my personal life, nor to toss in a plug for my upcoming paper, (although these are both unintended benefits) but because I wanted an excuse to revisit the hyphenation question and give a few arguments against a few arguments that the hyphen is necessary. Commenter mike — who, by the way, has a nice blog and a great outlook on grammar — suggested that this website had some “not-unreasonable” arguments for the hyphen. The arguments didn’t seem unreasonable, but also the author took pains to condescend to people like me and Mike and Donald Knuth, who use email unselfconsciously. And so I was forced to take pains to point out some flaws in these arguments for e-mail.
First off, the author claims that “Established publications edited by grown-ups” use e-mail. We’re so predictable, those of us engaged in this prescriptivist/descriptivist war, huh? The prescriptivists call the descriptivists ill-educated, or child-like, or focused on the lowest common denominator, or claim that we’re opening the gates to language barbarians. The descriptivists call the prescriptivists bloody-minded pedants, cantankerous old cads, or angry old coots. And so on. (Some muckrakers might even go so far as to attempt to claim that I have at times in the past engaged in such sophomoric name-calling, but I’m nearly positive that they’re mistaken.)
Anyway, the author had best hope that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Reuters News Service, and the Guardian don’t catch wind of this slight. I think they all like to think of themselves as established and edited by adults — well-educated and grammatically precise adults, no less. Ditto the Oxford English Dictionary, which lists email as the preferred spelling of the noun and as an acceptable spelling of the verb. And it first attests email in 1982.
Okay, so respectable grown-up publications use email. Next point: e-mail is not a compound word, but rather a word headed by a single letter abbrevation for electronic. Thus the hyphen should be retained because “no initial-letter-based abbreviation in the history of the English language has ever morphed into a solid word”. At first, I couldn’t think of any example of this either. The author cites A-frame as one example, but in this case, the A isn’t short for anything, so we’re not looking at quite the same situation. Better examples would be A-bomb and H-bomb, short for atomic and hydrogen bombs. However, even this isn’t quite the same situation, because A and H aren’t productive prefixes in English, at least as far as I’m aware. It’s not like I can say A-clock and have people figure out I mean atomic clock. It seems to me that the e- prefix is relatively unprecedented, so you can’t dismiss hyphen removal out of respect for the past. Both e and i have established themselves as productive prefixes without hyphens: iGoogle, iPod, iMac; eHarmony, ecard, eBay. I’m inclined to say these prefixes are proving themselves able to operate without a hyphen, regardless of what previous initial-letter-prefixes did.
And, finally, about the pronunciation of the unhyphenated version. No one but a contrarian would read the word email with the wrong pronunciation*; it’s common enough that people have memorized how it’s pronounced, and no reasonable mispronunciation of email sounds like another word. It is entirely possible for a word-initial e to be read as a long e [i: in IPA]; witness evil. And compounding/prefixing/suffixing words has always led to pronunciations that aren’t what you’d expect: cooccur, baseball, modeled. We are readers of English — complaining that a word doesn’t sound like it’s spelled is like complaining that a part of the ocean is too wet.
Summary: Look, there are arguments that e-mail is better with a hyphen, and there’re arguments that it’s better without one. None of them is compelling. Use the form you want.
[*An old (but not necessarily contrarian) potter could also confuse it with the word email, as in a type of ink used on porcelain, derived from the French word for “enamel”. This word is pronounced with an “eh” sound at the beginning. However, I can’t find this word attested on the internet, so I think the possibility of confusion is minor at the most.]
p.s.: I’m probably going to post quite sparingly for the next three to four weeks because I have to pound out my comps paper if I want to remain a graduate student. And I do, because it’s a pretty sweet lifestyle.
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April 24, 2008 at 11:20 am
Jonathon
I like Bill Walsh—as prescriptivists go, he’s generally pretty moderate and reasonable—but I do disagree with him on this point. Or rather, I think he makes some good arguments (and some poor ones), but none of them are so compelling as to convince me that e-mail should be universally preferred. When I brought up alleged pronunciation problems with email in your other post, I was referring to this argument of his.
I had considered the analogy with other letter prefixes to be the biggest argument against email, but I think you make a good counter-argument—e- is productive in ways that other letters aren’t, so the analogy is flawed.
April 27, 2008 at 7:38 am
zmjezhd
The really annoying trait of prescriptivists is that more often than not they simply get the facts or history of a usage wrong. (Most descriptivists I know have little problem with a standard language or style guide, and they tend to use them when writing.) Your example of email being maligned as puerile is just a case in point. Another canonical example would be the “recent” arrival of the non-gender-specific singular they, which has been regularly since Chaucer. Because their usage rules have so little to do with language as it is spoken or has been written by some of our better authors, they seldom feel the need to check some simple facts before uttering their fiats. This leads to all sorts of hilarity, like EB White using which to introduce some restrictive relative clauses.
May 14, 2008 at 11:17 am
renaissanceguy
I usually like it when the written form of a word reveals something of its etymology. My preference is e-mail, because that makes it clearer that he “e” stands for something.
The French have “couriel”. Perhaps we should have come up with “elmail.”
August 26, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Dan
I’m surprised at your choice of examples in which e and i are both “productive prefixes:” iGoogle, iPod, iMac; eHarmony, ecard, eBay.
After all, they are all product or company names. Gazoontite was a company name in the dot com era; certainly you wouldn’t propose changing the spelling of gesundheit, would you?
April 13, 2010 at 9:02 am
Ken
Just a note to the author:
eBay is short for Echo Bay, the original company name for eBay so it doesn’t really fit your list of words that have a prefix devoid of a meaning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay