The powers that be behind the SamPoll.com web site have set their sights on resolving a seemingly intractable duality of opinion: should there be a hyphen in the word "email"? As regular readers of Sneak's definitive prose will be aware, there really should be no debate. Email is email, but e-mail is a misspelling - in Sneak's book at least. Anyway, the SamPoll site plans to collect votes from 10,000 visitors, and will then declare the result. As the pollsters point out, there's no point in asking Bill Gates, given that one of his recent electronic missives bears the title, "Executive E-Mail: Preserving and Enhancing the Benefits of Email..." But then equally, Sneak feels that there is no point asking the people of the internet either. As a quick encounter with Google will prove, they don't know anything. Roughly 100,000 hits reveal that a sizeable minority of the web's population thinks the word email really ought to be spelled "emial". 

27 Jan 2005