E-mail from Forum member bance33 (March 27, 2011):Hi Joe, I appreciate receiving your regular email for the English Forum. Thanks! I just want to comment on the widespread use of the word “emails.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe “mail” is a mass noun that shouldn’t have an s in its plural form.
My reply to bance33:Being of the old English school like you, I was until recently a holdout for “e-mail” as a mass noun that shouldn’t have an “s” in its plural form. But seeing many respectable newspapers increasingly use the plural form “e-mails” (sometimes even without the hyphenation), I thought it was the better part of valor to capitulate to the popular usage. I don’t flinch anymore when using “e-mails” when referring to several pieces of the stuff, as in “The editor
received 124 e-mails yesterday about the newspaper’s inaccurate reporting.” In the Internet realm, after all, it doesn’t sound right to look at e-mail in the same physical sense as snail-mail and then to write “The editor r
eceived 124 pieces of e-mail yesterday about the newspaper’s inaccurate reporting.” Indeed, using the word “pieces” to refer to letters in digital form now seems to me a semantic aggravation, so I must now concede that the plural “e-mails” does make that sentence crisper and more concise: “The editor
received 124 e-mails yesterday about the newspaper’s inaccurate reporting.”
RELATED READING:AP Stylebook finally changes “e-mail” to “email”
