<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We thank all of you who took the time to respond to the question we posed two weeks ago: Should it be e-mail <\/em>or email<\/em>? There were eloquent arguments for both sides, but email <\/em>won decisively. \u201cTime to join the 21st century,\u201d wrote one gentleman, who added, \u201cand I\u2019m 61 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of you chose email<\/em> for pragmatic reasons, like this respondent: \u201cIn all practicality, email<\/em> will win. On my smartphone, anyone typing the word e-mail<\/em> has to shift to a second, then a third screen to complete the word.\u201d<\/p>\n What this amounts to, said another reader, is that \u201ctexting is creating a whole new language.\u201d<\/span> We find ourselves rattled by that thought.<\/p>\n If, as one of you wrote, \u201cThe only quick punctuation mark I have on my smartphone is the period,\u201d then this helps explain the indifference to hyphens, commas, apostrophes\u2014and capital letters after periods\u2014that we nitpickers are noting with ever-increasing dismay. <\/span>Why should advances in technology have to come at the expense of the English language?<\/p>\n Other readers took the long view. \u201c<\/span>When the use of a particular prefix with a particular word is new, the hyphen is a useful link,\u201d wrote one. \u201cOnce people become used to the new combination, the hyphen will be dropped.\u201d History bears out this astute observation. Let\u2019s look at some other familiar words that have followed the same pattern.<\/p>\n Goodbye<\/strong>: In 1968, Random House\u2019s American College Dictionary<\/em> demanded a hyphen, and preferred good-by<\/em> to good-bye<\/em>. The 1980 American Heritage dictionary agreed. But by 2006, American Heritage preferred goodbye<\/em>, although it also listed the hyphenated choices.<\/p>\n Passerby<\/strong>: It started out as passer-by<\/em>. The Associated Press Stylebook<\/em> still recommends the hyphen, but that probably won\u2019t last. The American Heritage dictionary already gave passerby <\/em>top billing eight years ago.<\/p>\n Fundraiser<\/strong>: After years of recommending fund-raiser<\/em>, the Associated Press\u2019s manual dropped the hyphen seven years or so ago.<\/p>\n Baseball<\/strong>: The one-word form we have today did not prevail until less than 100 years ago. It was base ball<\/em> in the early nineteenth century and base-ball <\/em>in the early twentieth century.<\/p>\n Grass-roots <\/strong>(adjective): The American Heritage dictionary, Webster\u2019s New World<\/em> (fourth edition), and the Associated Press all agree on the hyphen, but grassroots<\/em> is coming on strong.<\/p>\n So who are we to flout the inevitable? From now on, we\u2019ll grit our teeth and write email.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We thank all of you who took the time to respond to the question we posed two weeks ago: Should it be e-mail or email? There were eloquent arguments for both sides, but email won decisively. \u201cTime to join the 21st century,\u201d wrote one gentleman, who added, \u201cand I\u2019m 61 years old.\u201d Many of you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,21,15,13,12,35,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apostrophes","category-capitalization","category-colons","category-commas","category-effective-writing","category-hyphens","category-spelling"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}