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On 7/15/05, Joyce Fetterman <JoyceF -at- gtsoftware -dot- com> wrote:
> But do you also drop the hyphen in ecommerce and ebusiness?
>
> I retain the hyphens for clarity and consistency across all "e" terms, but
> of course it's just a style preference.
Joyce,
I strongly suspect that "email" is becoming the preferred term more
rapidly because of its ubiquity.
Also, it appears that those syllables which become blended--in which
the mouth tends to glide from one sound to the next without a definite
break--may also be faster to see the removal of punctuation that is an
artifact of the term's origin. We move smoothly from "e" to "em" while
to retain the long "e" sound we have an interrupt between the "e" and
the "commerce". This, obviously, is rank speculation on my part and
not the result of any sort of rigorous inquiry.
As far as retaining the hyphen in "e-commerce" and "e-business"--I
rarely use either term at all. Since networked information exchange is
now so inextricably enmeshed in most facets of business today, I find
little need or much useful distinction in prefacing either term with
"e". When such a distinction is useful, I simply use the full
"electronic" or another, more descriptive moniker as the situation
warrants.
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