This is a thinly veiled rant, I realize, but if anybody can rationalize "emails" for me in such a way that I can stop grabbing people who say it, and asking them if they've ever gone to their mailsbox to retrieve the mails left for them by the mailsman... I would very much appreciate it.
I realize it's probably pure laziness, but maybe someone can rationalize this in such a way that I can stop cringing every time I see it used in a professional setting.
According to Merriam-Webster,
[...]
2 b: an e-mail message <sent him an e–mail>
Wiktionary agrees:
e-mail (countable and uncountable; plural e-mails)
[...]
2. (countable, see Usage notes below)
A message sent via an e-mail system. I am searching through my old e-mails. He sent me several e-mails last week to that effect.
The usage notes read as follows:
As a contraction of electronic mail, some feel that e-mail should follow the same pluralization rules and be uncountable, prohibiting the forms e-mails and an e-mail. Others feel that it is not necessary for e-mail to maintain grammatical similarity to mail, and prefer to pluralize the term as a countable noun. This issue is hotly debated, but it is seldom considered incorrect to use the uncountable form.
To all this, I will add that it's rather cumbersome to say "X pieces of email" every time you could just as well say "X emails". You could call that laziness or sloppiness, if you wish, but that's how it often starts.
See it this way: even water and cheese can be countable in context. And you probably don't cringe when you hear someone ordering two coffees.
Now, if only there were such a thing as electronic letters in addition to electronic mail... Alas, that didn't quite catch on.
I use both "emails" and "email" in the following manner:
- I need to check my email.
- I sent you several emails, to which you have yet to respond.
My rationalization for #2 is that "emails" is short for "email messages". I would never, however, say "I need to check my emails," because in "I need to check my email," the word "email" is a collective noun (to me at least).
I should also point out that this is the usage I have seen in business in the New England and Midwestern regions of the US (American English). Usage in British English may be different.
It is mostly unfortunate that the original evangelists of email decided to use the metaphor of the postal service to describe the new electronic message format. Instead of thinking of email as literally electronic post, think of it as bad PR.
An email message is not carried to your computer by little electronic ponies across the electric Wild West, nor is it trudged to your terminal by little electronic men and women wearing their little electronic blue shorts. Thankfully, there aren't electronic post offices at which you have to go and wait for hours while someone's electronic child wails behind you.
Other than sharing the word "mail" and serving to transport thoughts between a rhetor and audience, physical post and electronic messages are two wildly different things.
The word "email" is part of a living usage set. Just because Random House and Britannica can't keep up with how a word is used does not mean that such usage is wrong. Have a Google for a gent named Philip Gove (or have a read about him here) and you'll be introduced to the centuries-old conflict between prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries and their ability to stay relevant to living languages.
The noun "email," today, has a commonly accepted usage roughly framed as "a message transported electronically" Something more specific is of course necessary (involving mailserver protocols and all that) but this is what people mean.
You'd likely not want to throttle someone for saying "I sent three messages yesterday," because that's a common usage. Just as common usage has progressed from "Web site" to "web site" to "website," so to has it progressed from "E-mail" to "e-mail" to "email." The word itself no longer requires its original expansion because, frankly, the usage is common knowledge.
If such ruminations aren't adequate, however, you might instead rationalize it by telling yourself that such persons are using "a letter" as the metaphor for "an email," and therefore are in the clear when saying "letters"/"emails."
(To note, the above-linked essay is from my own hand. I'm not hit-trolling, just that it draws from some 18 other sources on the topic of Mr. Webster, Mr. Gove and the tendency for prescriptive dictionaries to become minimized and irrelevant.)
This is a thinly veiled rant, I realize, but if anybody can rationalize "emails" for me in such a way that I can stop grabbing people who say it, and asking them if they've ever gone to their mailsbox to retrieve the mails left for them by the mailsman... I would very much appreciate it.
In English, when a noun modifies a second noun, the first noun is always singular. For example, the shop which sells shoes is a "shoe shop" rather than a "shoes shop". Similarly, regardless of whether mail is countable or uncountable, the box where the mail(s) are is a "mail box" and similarly for "mail man".
While the verb email is a direct analog to the verb mail, the noun email is a direct analog to the noun letter, and can therefore be pluralized... yes, I retrieve the letters left for me by the mailman, and if you sent me two messages via email, I would read both those emails.
