In defense of e-mail
The editors of the AP Stylebook have killed e-mail. It’s just email now.
The style gods on Saturday weighed in on other matters of technology: E-book and e-commerce retain the mark. Cellphone and smartphone each become one word.
Handheld is now acceptable as a noun, and it’s one word. (Apple makes popular handhelds.) Hand-held, as an adjective, is hyphenated. (Apple makes popular hand-held devices.)
I hate the latter change for two reasons. One, AP is unusually progressive here. Who uses handheld as a noun? Two, the sometimes-hyphenated style introduces a lot of consternation. I used to be a copy editor. I rejoiced when AP finally dropped the hyphen from fund-raiser and fund-raising. In The Beginning, they were two words. Then they were hyphenated. Then, the hyphen was dropped from some forms but not others. The hyphen was unnecessary; the meaning of the words was no less clear without them, and the words were no harder to read or pronounce.
As for e-mail: I may never stop using the hyphen. Then, I’m old-fashioned. I held on to E-mail (capital E) for awhile, since abbreviations are capitalized in English. My name is Andrew R. Phelps, not Andrew r Phelps. But I digress.
First, email is just ugly. Look at it. Email. It’s gross. Yes, we marry words to form compound nouns. But where else in the language do we marry a letter to a word? Xray? Tshirt? (Well, people do write that.)
Second, email looks like it should be pronounced ehh-mail. A lot of the rules for writing are determined by how we speak. You write “a historic” in America because the H is pronounced in historic; you write “an historic” in Britain because the H is not pronounced. We say e-mail, so I prefer to write e-mail.
I’ll let a grammarian much smarter than I — Washington Post copy editor Bill Walsh — defend the hyphen:
Compound nouns do tend to go from separate to joined, often (though not so often anymore) with a hyphen stage. The problem with “e-mail” is that it’s not a simple compound noun. It’s an initial-letter-based abbreviation, and no initial-letter-based abbreviation in the history of the English language has ever morphed into a solid word. The “e” isn’t simply a syllable — it’s the letter e, for Chrissakes, like the X in “X-ray.” Nobody lives in an “aframe,” nobody drives a “zcar,” and you will find no example parallel to the illiteracism “email.” “Email” (the French word for “enamel,” by the way) divorces the e, ee, eee! so that the first syllable begs to be a schwa sound. Uhmail. Uh.
A lot of folks have begun writing ebook, too. It was difficult for me to write this story on Foreign Policy’s latest e-book and have the hyphen unceremoniously removed. (Ehh-book?)
It is simply e-gregious.
