Boston Globe - Earlier this month, at a national convention of professional copy editors, the Associated Press announced a few changes to its house style. Calcutta would henceforth be Kolkata, cell phone and smart phone had become cellphone and smartphone, and CPR no longer needed the gloss “cardiopulmonary resuscitation.”...But it was the tiniest change on the list that set editors and word-watchers atwitter: The AP decreed that e-mail, after a minor surgical procedure, would emerge as the hyphen-less email.
Whoa, whoa, whoa...So this is real? Like it's official? I thought I noticed something strange going on over the past few months, various spell checkers have been auto correcting my spelling of e-mail to email, without the hyphen. It was driving me mad. Right up until I read this article I thought I was simply losing my mind. Like this strange ingrained belief that there was a hyphen in e-mail was just a crazy idea, incepted in my mind at some point.
Turns out nope, wasn't that I'm crazy. The people who run the internet have apparently been working on this slow switch for a while now, they just didn't feel like telling anyone or letting the rest of us in on the change. And I'm sure they rather enjoyed themselves with this little practical joke. I can just see the good old people of Google cackling daily as the search requests for the proper spelling of e-mail/email roll in. Very funny guys, now can we change this back?
Because I'll tell you what, I'm not on board. For years I've been very conscious of this little quirk in the English language, to the point that it's now been ingrained in my finger's muscle memory. Now I've got to re-teach my fingers? Uh-uh, no way. I'm sticking with the hyphen, even if it means going down with a sinking ship. I might even go get a high school English teaching job just to keep the hyphen alive, just failing kids who refuse to hyphenate the word. I'm very bitter about this change, I should have been consulted.
