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Keep your English up to date
e-
Professor David Crystal
In a vote, in 1998, the American Dialect Society looked for "the
new word that was most likely to succeed." And they had an
accolade - "the word of the year". And that particular year, it
wasn't a word at all, it was 'e-', e hyphen, the prefix, meaning
electronic of course, as you'll find it in e-mail for instance, these
days, a lot.
Well, why did they think it was going to be such a successful
development? Well because in the mid-1990s they had noticed,
the American Dialect Society had noticed how many people were
starting to use this e- prefix and applying it to all kinds of
circumstances. And in the 1990s you got all these developments:
e-books (electronic books); e-voting (electronic voting); you could
get a loan from a company by e-mail, and it would be an e-loan.
There were e-newsletters, e-securities, e-shopping, hundreds more.
And people after a while began to play with the word - you will have heard this
too: you know about retail and retailing. Well now you can have e-tail and e-tailing,
because that's retail shopping over the internet.
And of course it didn't take long before people started to complain about the way
in which it was over-used. In fact a couple of years later, one of the big internet
magazines said "this is a word, this is a prefix that has to go! Everybody is using it
too much." Well, it hasn't gone - it's here to stay. E-speak is the future!
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