A Matter of (Wired News) Style
by Tony Long
October 23, 2000

As part of revamping its style guidelines, Wired News now inserts a hyphen into "e-mail." Does this represent a betrayal of the digital culture or, as copy chief Tony Long argues, a badly needed return to linguistic sanity?

The history of the emoticon kinda reminded me of this other bit of Internet writing style. Personally, after this article appeared, I've adopted the Wired style and been writing "e-mail," hyphen and all.

So what was Wired's reason to adopt this notation?

...[Despite] conventional wisdom that "new terms often start as two words, then become hyphenated, and eventually end up as one word," Wired News now inserts a hyphen into e-mail (and every other e-word), as God and Noah Webster intended. Call it striking a blow for the majesty of the English language, assuming you can find anything majestic in a word like "e-mail."

The decision to hyphenate e-mail becomes even easier when you consider that "email" as a solid word certainly evolved because some programmer was either too lazy or too ignorant to correctly insert the hyphen in the first place.

Besides, the "e" means electronic, and a principal function of the hyphen is to join two words to form a completely new word. In this case, "electronic" and "mail." Ergo, e-mail.

Justification enough for me.

Happy Birthday :-) to You: A Smiley Face Turns 20
By Katie Hafner
September 19, 2002

Twenty years ago today, Scott E. Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, posted an electronic message on a university bulletin board system suggesting that a colon, a minus sign and a parenthesis be used to convey a joking tone.

Who would have thought someone would have cared to track back the origin of the emoticon? Well, it wasn't just a matter of finding who fathered the text equivalent of the yellow "have a nice day" icon, mind you; it was part of a preservation project seeking to keep the electronic history of Carnegie Mellon.

And how did Dr. Fahlman's original message read?

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(

And so the emoticon was born. At least, as far as evidence could be traced: Preceding Dr. Fahlman's post, a Mr. Kevin Mackenzie posted a similar proposal to a discussion group on the Arpanet, the Internet's predecesor, in 1979.

"What he did was certainly an emoticon," Dr. Fahlman said of Mr. Mackenzie, who seems to have disappeared from the computer scene. "As far as I know, I'm the first one who did colon, minus, paren. And he didn't have the turn-your-head-sideways idea." Dr. Fahlman added that Mr. Mackenzie's suggestion failed to catch on as his did.

And though there's reasonable skepticism regarding the worth of typed facial gestures to written language where the tone of writing should suffice, such shorthand no doubt comes in, uh, handy when writing on the oh-so-fast medium of typed messages. [Insert smiling emoticon here.]