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>My company is all about e-commerce and we retain the
>hyphen in all these e-, i-, and c- buzzwords. I agree
>with Jo that there's an excellent argument for keeping
>the hyphen, although some companies are merging the e
>with the rest of the word as part of their branding.
>I've seen eBusiness, Ebusiness, etc.
I must be getting old. I remember when we had a whole alphabet of
26 letters.
"ROGERS, MARTHA" <MARTHA -dot- ROGERS -at- DFAS -dot- MIL> wrote;
>
> The MS style manual says to avoid coining a new e-word unless you're certain your users will understand >the coined word. The manual deems "e-mail" and "e-form" acceptable. In the examples, each e-word takes a hyphen.
Another good reason for avoiding these coinages is that they date
very quickly. I notice that some companies that were set up in
the last couple of years are quietly dropping the dot-com from
their names for the same reason.
A few of these terms, such as "e-mail" will probably stick
around. "E-business" might too, but, once the Internet is an
established part of business, nobody will want to single it out
from anything else that a company does. However, I suspect that,
ten years from now, the only people who remember most of these
terms are people who are heavily into nostalgia and historical
novelists (who will use "e-this" and "e-that" for period
flavour).
--
Bruce Byfield, Outlaw Communications
Contributing Editor, Maximum Linux
bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com | Tel: 604.421.7189
"At the sick bed of Cuhullain,
We'll kneel and say a prayer,
When the ghosts are rattling at the door
And the devil's in the chair."
- The Pogues
