Letters are letters, but the Internet gives them a new existence.

Linguist Daniel Midgley looks at what’s happening to the e in email, examines the i in your iPad, and puts the x in sex. All on this week’s Talk the Talk.


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16: Letters and Hyphens

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Show notes

The AP Stylebook drops ‘e-mail’ for ’email’
http://mashable.com/2011/03/18/ap-stylebook-email/

Before that, they’d done the same for ‘website’.
http://mashable.com/2010/04/16/ap-stylebook-website/

Google n-gram Viewer shows the stats for ‘web site’ v ‘website’

Ben Zimmer lends some perspective about the ‘disappearing hyphen’.
http://blog.oup.com/2007/09/hyphens/

When do you use hyphens anyway?
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/punctuationhyphen/hyphen-

A paper on ‘e-‘ as a prefix (PDF):
http://startrek.ccs.yorku.ca/~topia/docs/conference/McDonald.pdf

.xxx is a top-level domain now.
http://mashable.com/2011/03/19/xxx-tld-porn/

Britain adds the ‘x’ rating
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H_certificate#1932.E2.80.931951