[ih] ARPANET vs ARPAnet?

[Mike Padlipsky]

At 04:20 PM 10/4/2006, Dave Crocker wrote:
>ps. THis also means we should get the hyphen out of email.

while i'd intended to stay out of this one, since my own original 
preference for the indisputably historically accurate rendering does 
seem to be the consensus position and my latterday fondness for the 
arguably more philologically accurate 'ARPANet' isn't strong enough 
to have prompted me to join in, that's too much for me to hold my peace over.

'e-mail' is bad enough, being not only historically inaccurate but 
also both overcutesy and encouraging the subliterati to babble about 
'sending an e-mail' even tho even they aren't ignorant enough to say 
'send me a mail'.  but 'email' is even worse, given that as written 
it really ought to be pronounced 'em-ail', as in dorothy gale's 
uncle's wife isn't feeling well, to say nothing of its catering to 
the evil dummy-downers' conscious or unconscious tendency to save the 
newspapers some ink whenever they can regardless of the loss of 
precision it entails.

if the truth be known [and if attempts to impose our own tastes are 
in play, as they appear to be], when it comes to 'we should's what i 
think we should call it is netmail, as we called it when we were 
inventing it -- however much too much to hope for that level of 
historical accuracy is.

not that the world will particularly note whatever we say here, of course....


cheers, map

[whose shoulder problems caused him to break down some time ago and 
create a 'signature' file to apologize for the lack of his formerly 
customary e-volubility -- and who's been employing shiftless typing 
for a long time now to spare his wristsnfingers, in case you didn't 
know ... and who's further broken down and done 
http://www.lafn.org/~ba213/mapstuff.html , rather grudgingly]