Or would you rather just email me?
A couple of readers have asked me about making “email” a verb. I’m a little surprised they didn’t ask about taking out the hyphen in email.
Well, as I wrote in my piece about verbyfying nouns, some of our strongest verbs were once nouns. Linguists like to trace when nouns first became used as verbs, and I suppose some words were used as nouns and verbs almost from the beginning.
Take the word “work,” for example. I have no idea. Was it first a noun or a verb?
It certainly didn’t take long for “email” to be used as a verb. At least the form of the word remained the same, and we did not “ize” it. Wouldn’t it be awful if we “emailized” people?
All I know is, one day I made a momentous decision. I decided on the same day that I would never again put a hyphen in “email” and that I would lower-case (notice that verb!) “internet.”
So, OK, “email” me. But for heaven’s sake, don’t “copy” me!
