Penn State Deluge - Vol. 2 No. 1 - Spring 2004

Originally appeared in The Daily Collegian at Pennsylvania State University, Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2001, in the Science and Technology section, with the headline "Internet can cause linguistical waves." By Jeremy R. Cooke, Collegian Staff Writer

To e-mail or not to e-mail, that isn't the question.

Sending messages among computers in chunks of words we used to call "letters" is a practice that has proven its usefulness and versatility, despite the occasional nuisance of viruses.

But what's in a name?

If Shakespeare had lived to suffer the slings and arrows of Internet worms, would Hamlet have uttered, "Come, I will give you way for these your e-mails"? Or would he have spurned the "s" and spoken instead of "this your bundle of e-mail"?

Linguists, computer specialists, newspaper stylists and many English speakers disagree about the proper plural form of "e-mail" and generally how to use the word.
Just as the Internet lacks any universal regulatory body, so too the words and phrases that evolve into the parlance of the online world often withstand attempts at standardization.

Most newspaper style guides, however, make that attempt.

The New York Times' style guide recommends using the construction "an e-mail message" instead of "an e-mail," said Lisa Guernsey, a reporter for the newspaper's technology section.

The Associated Press suggests that "e-mail" can refer to either electronic mail or a single message.

College newspapers like The Daily Collegian and The Daily Pennsylvanian in Philadelphia allow for broader uses.

Reporters at The Collegian can use "e-mail" as a verb or as a noun. While the style guide makes no mention of the plural form—"e-mails"—it does appear in articles sometimes.

Andrew Armstrong, a student at the University of Pennsylvania who copyedits for The Daily Pennsylvanian, says his paper embraces either form.

"We do use the form 'e-mail' and 'e-mails,' " he said [in an e-mail]. "The term has become so rooted into the country's language, and especially the language of a college campus, that I think our style there, while slightly less formal, is perfectly fine."

Armstrong has noticed that technology words change rapidly.

"When something's new, a lot of times it's in quotation marks, and then it eventually moves on to drop them once it's no longer a buzzword and it enters the vernacular," he said.

Gerry Santoro also keeps an ear on the way new computer words develop. He serves as an assistant professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State with a joint appointment in speech communication.
"There's an interesting phenomenon that a lot of the technical terms, which in many cases start out as nouns, creep their way into the popular vernacular and end up becoming verbs," Santoro said.

He cites the example of file transfer protocol (FTP), a common way for many Penn State students to upload Web pages.

"It's specifically a noun, but I hear students saying, 'I'm "FTPing" this' or 'I "FTPed" this last week.' They're turning it into a verb," Santoro said.

Santoro said he's bothered by the looser usage of "e-mail" and "e-mails," but he knows there's not too much he can do. "I have to recognize that language is a very fluid thing. At some point you're standing in the ocean trying to hold back the tide," he said.

Santoro suggests these habits are the sign of a greater problem he notices among students—"not knowing how to separate the language they use back home from the language they use in a professional situation."

He said students should learn to understand when it's more appropriate to write things formally and when they can be informal.

If Santoro were writing a formal paper, he said he would use "electronic mail" or "E-mail" with the first letter capitalized. He would not, however, use "email" without the hyphen as some students do.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, electronic mail has been colloquially shortened as "email" or "e-mail" since at least 1982, when few computer users even knew what it was.

Language buffs who peruse the dictionary might also recognize another, more antiquated word—"email"—pronounced "EH-mail" and referring to a kind of ink used on glass or porcelain.

Barbara Bullock, associate professor of linguistics, does not agree with Santoro's use of the word in spelling or hyphenation.

"I use 'emails' freely and without any guilt," Bullock said [in an e-mail].

Does Bullock think English writers and speakers should try to reverse the tide?

She answers "no" for two reasons.

"One: I'm not sure that you can and, two: I'm also not sure that we should want to reverse it because it's really quite interesting," she said. "It follows perfectly from the way we use our language."

"Mail" is a collective noun, which cannot be pluralized. Collective nouns need some kind of "counter" to be tallied, such as "grains of sand, drops of water, or pieces of mail," Bullock explained.

"But 'email' is used differently from 'mail' even if it looks as if it should be identical," Bullock said.

"In English, if you can count it, then you can pluralize it. 'Email' has become a countable noun that can refer to email messages as well as to email as a mass. Given that, you simply can't stem the tide, and I personally wouldn't want to!"

When speaking of the overwhelming trends in new word usage, ocean metaphors seem to abound. As far as Bullock and some of her other colleagues in the linguistics program are concerned, "e-mails"—with or without the hyphen—are here to stay.

Appendix II

Cartoon by Peter Steiner. Appeared on page 61 of the July 5, 1993, issue of the New Yorker. Reproduced only for academic discussion, evaluation or research and complies with the copyright law of the United States as defined and stipulated under Title 17 U.S. Code.

[ Contents | Abstract | Intro | I | II | III | IV | V | VI ]
[ Notes | Works Cited | Appendix ]

Deluge Links