Wednesday, March 23, 2011

And the e-mail lost the dash next victim: "Internet"

ROME - If you had a doubt, now no longer have the "Email", e-mail, you write like that, without a hyphen. No more "E-mail" or "e-mail, but a new word, coined by the update of the Associated Press Style Book, a manual with written guidelines that reporters interiors are bound to respect. If there were a similar one in Italy, we know once and for all whether to write "center-left" or "center", but this is a political issue on which they are divided, perhaps in vain, the experts.

Digital Esperanto. In the new amendments to 2011 edition of the manual so there is the abandonment of the dash of the email, along with the smart-phone and cell-phone, that is just as smart phones and cellphone. But is the choice of tack on "Email" language to capture the moment with a universal word that has entered the lexicon of fabric around the world, a more appropriate summary of the phonetic of globalization.

All over the planet an email is an email, like hamburgers and Coca cola multinationals. And as is becoming the social networks and the 'app' for smartphones. Attention because the directives of the PA are not automatically change the official neologisms or syntax, but only a self-defined code: you can safely continue to write "E-mail" without fear of making spelling errors or be rebuked by the head.

Unless you work the Associated Press. Changes to the language but are traveling to the summary in the world, slowly approaching the word to the symbol and the concept of the icon. The next victim. Other mutations lexical undoubtedly come next year. The explosion of social networks for example, requires simple terms to indicate that someone has clicked "I like" on Facebook.

Currently, it takes a whole sentence. But it could get a word in summarizing the action of a few letters, press the "Like Button" we would like to suggest "cLiked. Then there is clarity on the conjugation of verbs in the past to describe actions on Twitter: it's fair to say "Twitted" or "Twittered"? It must also intervene on behalf of the web.

That at the time, many written in capital letters, "Internet" and many in lower case, "internet". To be fair, being an instrument, it should be in lowercase. But being a reference as accurate and comprehensive, perhaps the AP decides to capitalize. The elimination of the hyphen has been announced in the 2011 dell'Aces, a workshop dedicated to the American proofreaders and "editor".

Strange that the AP has decided to focus "officially" only three words, while the doubt remains on many others. E-book or ebook? E-learning, elearning or eLearning? The debate is open. Last year, instead of eliminations Ap suggested a contraction, eliminating a space to indicate a web site, the good proofreader will have to write "website" and not "web site".

They are small fixes that sedimented in language over time, becoming the officer's word. Vocabulary needed when dealing with technology, because the concepts and inventions become everyday tools: remove the "E" in email to indicate that it comes to e-mail, no longer makes sense in a world where digital controls on everything.

And then "Email" is just a variation of the usual "mail", a category more associated with the concept of "mail". In Italian, however, will still have to write "electronic mail", add the two words will always be blue error.

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