
The Post drops the ‘mike’ – and the hyphen in ‘e-mail’ - bane
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-post-drops-the-mike--and-the-hyphen-in-e-mail/2015/12/04/ccd6e33a-98fa-11e5-8917-653b65c809eb_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-c%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
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breakingcups
"I called email “an abomination.” That was 15 years ago, but I’m still
surprised anyone ever thought to write the word that way.

While it’s true that commonly used two-word or hyphenated compounds often
solidify into single words over time, that had never before happened with a
compound based on a single letter. We had T-shirts and X-rays for a long time
before electronic mail showed up, but we still aren’t writing about tshirts
and xrays."

Maybe that's because Both T and X are consonants and E isn't?

~~~
kwhitefoot
> we still aren’t writing about tshirts and xrays.

You and I might not be but a lot of other people are. Google returns 54M hits
for x-rays and 28M for xrays.

The status of T-shirts is a bit clearer 340M versus 18M.

And of course I haven't taken into account how Google handles word variants.

