7 ms·
It's been fun to watch the E-MAIL --> E-Mail --> E-mail --> e-mail --> email transition
by howeman 12y ago
It's been fun to watch the E-MAIL --> E-Mail --> E-mail --> e-mail --> email transition
- raimondious 12y agoYou and I have different ideas of what's fun ;)
- untog 12y agoThe different perceptions of what a ;) suggests is also fun to watch.
- dredmorbius 12y agoYou're right. I'm still engaged by the "Internet" vs. "internet" debate.
- 6cxs2hd6 12y agoI don't bother to debate it anymore. I just write "internet". Just like I write "web", "blog", "electricity", and "debate". (I do however capitalize "I". Because narcissism.)
- dredmorbius 12y agoI write "Internet". It's not one of a class of things, it is _the_ thing. Similarly I'll capitalize Earth, Moon, Sun, and Solar System when referring to the specific planet humans live on, moon orbiting that planet, the star they both orbit, and the solar system containing them all. But there's also "earth" as in dirt, and generic moons of other planets, and suns of other solar systems. It's also interesting to note that the Internet is a superclass -- it's a network of networks (you'll discover this if you dig into BGP and realize what ASNs represent). And for networks connected via TCP/IP and BGP, it's the superclass of all such networks and a universal. If it were to fragment, or one or more independent networks were to emerge, or sufficiently off-planet networks would develop that couldn't directly participate in terrestrial Internet traffic, that's going to remain the case.
- martiuk 12y agoWho even puts a dash between the e and mail nowadays? "I'll just email you instead"
- logfromblammo 12y agoI sometimes use a hyphen. I would never use a dash in that fashion. The National Society for Grammatical Correctness would like to invite you to our re-education camp. After a fun day of hand-sorting hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes, you will collapse onto your hard concrete slab knowing that punctuation is as important to the sentence as spelling is to the word--and also that Grammar Nazis are jerks. But the real question is why we haven't simply dropped the 'e' altogether and differentiate it from the physical shipment of papers by calling the latter "postal mail" or "snail mail" or "paper mail" or something else reflecting its reduced status as a means of communication.
- skywhopper 12y agoThe New York Times only just dropped the hyphen: http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/23/5022332/the-new-york-times-embraces-email-over-e-mail-in-updated-style http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/23/5022332/the-new-york-time... Worse (imo) was their long-time refusal to use the term "weblog" for such sites even though the inventors of the word, years before there were any articles about them, had always spelled it as one word, leading to such awkward copy as "a Web log, or 'blog'". The willingness to accept one neologism at face value ("blog") but not its ancestor ("weblog") reveals an unhealthy tendency to favor false logic ("we call it the World Wide Web, so it must be 'Web log'") over the actual history and usage of a word. Style guides should be about improving clarity, but changing the capitalization and adding a space to a new word is only going to cause confusion. It hardly matters now that the original variant "weblog" is basically gone from actual usage, but I think it's a useful glimpse into the editors' mindset.
- mmanfrin 12y agoYou forget that small little phase where it was e-Mail for a spell.