RE: a question of style

["Dok, D. van" <d vandok ecn nl>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jfleck inkstain net [mailto:jfleck inkstain net]
> Sent: Monday, October 23, 2000 22:52
> To: gnome-doc-list gnome org
> Subject: a question of style
> 
> 
> From today's Wired News:
> 
> "As part of revamping its style guidelines, Wired News
> now inserts a hyphen into "e-mail." Does this
> represent a betrayal of the digital culture or,
> as copy chief Tony Long argues, a badly needed return to
> linguistic sanity?"
> 

May I quote Donald Knuth, from his home page:

http://Sunburn.Stanford.EDU/~knuth/email.html

<quote>

Email (let's drop the hyphen) 

[...]

A note on email versus e-mail 

Newly coined nonce words are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen
disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to
write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and
``software''; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus
it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling ``e-mail''.
Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now!
The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years,
so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard.
(Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France much longer than in
England --- but for an entirely different reason.) 

</quote>

If I know anyone being picky about style, it's DEK. So save all the
keystrokes you would waste in discussing this topic!

Dennis van Dok