IP: Re: Bush to Gore

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 15:39:16 -0800
> From: Mark Boolootian <booloo () cats ucsc edu>
> To: David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
> Subject: Re: IP: Bush to Gore
> Reply-To: booloo () cats ucsc edu
>
>
> >  >   "Thank you for your e-mail. This Internet
> >  >         of yours is a wonderful invention."
>
> His hyphenation of the word email is quaint.  My guess is Bush doesn't spend
> much time on the net.  Don Knuth has had a short paragraph on this subject on
> one of his pages for quite some time:
>
>   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.)