E-mail

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Electronic mail, often abbreviated as e-mail or email, is a method of exchanging digital messages, designed primarily for human use. A message at least consists of its content, an author address and one or more recipient addresses. The foundation for today's global Internet email service was created in the early Arpanet and was codified as a standard for encoding of messages, as RFC 733. An email sent in the early 1970s looked very similar to one sent on the Internet today. Conversion from Arpanet to Internet in the early 1980s produced the modern details of the current, core service, with transport provided by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet Standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982, and a revision of RFC 733 to be Internet Standard 11 (RFC 822). Multi-media content attachments were standardized in 1996 with RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).

Email systems that operate over a network (rather than being limited to a single, shared machine) are based on a store-and-forward model in which email computer server systems accept, forward, deliver or store messages on behalf of users, who only need to connect to the email infrastructure with their personal computer or other network-enabled device for the duration of message submission to, or retrieval from, their designated server. Rarely is email transmitted directly from one user's device to another's.

Spelling

The spellings e-mail and email are both common. Several prominent journalistic and technical style guides recommend e-mail, and the spelling email is also recognized in many dictionaries. In the original RFC neither spelling is used; the service is referred to as mail, and a single piece of electronic mail is called a message. The plural form "e-mails" (or emails) is also recognised.

Newer RFCs and IETF working groups require email for consistent capitalization, hyphenation, and spelling of terms. ARPAnet/DARPAnet users and early developers from Unix, CMS, AppleLink, eWorld, AOL, GEnie, and HotMail used eMail with the letter M capitalized. The authors of some of the original RFCs used eMail when giving their own addresses.

Donald Knuth considers the spelling "e-mail" to be archaic and notes that it is more often spelled "email" in the UK. In some other European languages (French, German, Dutch, Romanian), "email" (ignoring diacritics) is the word for "enamel".

Origin

E-mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating the Internet.

MIT first demonstrated the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961. It allowed multiple users to log into the IBM 7094 from remote dial-up terminals, and to store files online on disk. This new ability encouraged users to share information in new ways. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the exact history is murky, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.

E-mail was quickly extended to become network e-mail, allowing users to pass messages between different computers by 1966 or earlier (it is possible that the SAGE system had something similar some time before).

The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the development of e-mail. There is one report that indicates experimental inter-system e-mail transfers began shortly after its creation in 1969. Ray Tomlinson initiated the use of the "@" sign to separate the names of the user and their machine in 1971.^[18] The ARPANET significantly increased the popularity of e-mail, and it became the killer app of the ARPANET.

Most other networks had their own email protocols and address formats; as the influence of the ARPANET and later the Internet grew, central sites often hosted email gateways that passed mail between the Internet and these other networks. Internet email addressing is still complicated by the need to handle mail destined for these older networks. Some well-known examples of these were UUCP (mostly Unix computers), BITNET (mostly IBM and VAX mainframes at universities), FidoNet (personal computers), and DECNET (various networks).

An example of an Internet email address that routed mail to a user at a UUCP host:

hubhost!middlehost!edgehost!user@uucpgateway.somedomain.example.com

This was necessary because in early years UUCP computers did not maintain (or consult servers for) information about the location of all hosts they exchanged mail with, but rather only knew how to communicate with a few network neighbors; email messages (and other data such as Usenet News) were passed along in a chain among hosts who had explicitly agreed to share data with each other.

Internet slang

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Internet slang (Internet language, netspeak, or chatspeak) is slang that Internet users have popularized and, in many cases, coined. Such terms often originate with the purpose of saving keystrokes, and many people use the same abbreviations in text messages, instant messaging, and Twitter, or Facebook . Acronyms, keyboard symbols, and shortened words are often methods of abbreviation in Internet slang.

In other cases, new dialects of Internet slang such as leet or Lolspeak develop as ingroup memes rather than time savers. In leet speak, letters may be replaced by characters of similar appearance. For this reason, leet is often written as l33t or 1337.

Origins of internet slang

In 1975, Raphael Finkel at Stanford compiled a collection, the Jargon File, of hacker slang from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities. Two items on this list in current use as internet slang are "flame" and "loser". By 1990 the Jargon File had been enriched with examples of shorthand used in talk mode between two terminals (for example, "BTW", "FYI", and "TNX") as well as some slang expressions in use on Usenet and new commercial networks like Compuserve (for example, "LOL", "ROTF", and "AFK".)

A Computerworld article discussing the origin of some current web slang terms cites a still-online Fidonet article from 1989, which displays emoticons in addition to all-caps shortcuts like "LOL" and "BRB".

Spread of internet slang beyond computer-mediated communication

Many items of internet jargon cross from computer-mediated communication to face-to-face communication. For example, The New York Times collected "buzzwords of 2008" include "FAIL", "longphoto" (a term coined by Flickr for videos less than 90 seconds long), and various terms starting with "tw-" inspired by the web service Twitter.

Teenagers now sometimes use internet acronyms in spoken communication as well as in written, for example, ROFL (pronounced /ˈroʊfəl/ or /ˈrɒfəl/) and LOL (pronounced /ˈloʊl/, /ˈlɒl/, or /ˌɛloʊˈɛl/). David Crystal says that the crossover from written slang to speech is "a brand new variety of language evolving, invented really by young people, within five years".

Other commentators disagree, saying that these new words, being abbreviations for existing, long-used, phrases, don't "enrich" anything; they just shorten it. Furthermore, linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum of the University of Edinburgh states that even if interjections such as LOL and ROTFL were to become very common in spoken English, their "total effect on language" would be "utterly trivial".

Laccetti (professor of humanities at Stevens Institute of Technology) and Molsk, in their essay entitled The Lost Art of Writing, are critical of the acronyms, predicting reduced chances of employment for students who use such acronyms, stating that, "Unfortunately for these students, their bosses will not be 'lol' when they read a report that lacks proper punctuation and grammar, has numerous misspellings, various made-up words, and silly acronyms." Fondiller and Nerone in their style manual assert that "professional or business communication should never be careless or poorly constructed" whether one is writing an electronic mail message or an article for publication, and warn against the use of smileys and these abbreviations, stating that they are "no more than e-mail slang and have no place in business communication".

Yunker and Barry in a study of online courses and how they can be improved through podcasting have found that these acronyms, and emoticons as well, are "often misunderstood" by students and are "difficult to decipher" unless their meanings are explained in advance. They single out the example of "ROFL" as not obviously being the abbreviation of "rolling on the floor laughing" (emphasis added). Haig singles out LOL as one of the three most popular initialisms in Internet slang, alongside BFN ("bye for now") and IMHO ("in my humble opinion"). He describes these acronyms, and the various initialisms of Internet slang in general, as convenient, but warns that "as ever more obscure acronyms emerge they can also be rather confusing". Bidgoli likewise states that these initialisms "save keystrokes for the sender but [...] might make comprehension of the message more difficult for the receiver" and that "[s]lang may hold different meanings and lead to misunderstandings especially in international settings"; he advises that they be used "only when you are sure that the other person knows the meaning".

A 2003 study of college students by Naomi Baron found that the use of initialisms even in computer-mediated communication (CMC), specifically in instant messaging, was actually lower than she had expected. The students "used few abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons". The spelling was "reasonably good" and contractions were "not ubiquitous". Out of 2,185 transmissions, there were 90 initialisms in total, only 31 CMC-style abbreviations, and 49 emoticons. Out of the 90 initialisms, 76 were occurrences of "lol".

Linguistic analysis

Shortis observes that ROTFL is a means of "annotating text with stage directions". Hueng, in discussing these acronyms in the context of performative utterances, points out the difference between telling someone that one is laughing out loud and actually laughing out loud: "The latter response is a straightforward action. The former is a self-reflexive representation of an action: I not only do something but also show you that I am doing it. Or indeed, I may not actually laugh out loud but may use the locution 'LOL' to communicate my appreciation of your attempt at humor."

David Crystal notes that use of LOL is not necessarily genuine, just as the use of smiley faces or grins is not necessarily genuine, posing the rhetorical question "How many people are actually 'laughing out loud' when they send LOL?". Franzini concurs, stating that there is as yet no research that has determined the percentage of people who are actually laughing out loud when they write "LOL".

Bonnie Ruberg, in an article concerning internet linguistics shares the following insight, "In a world of text communication where real-life facial expressions and vocal intonations are impossible, abbreviations like "lol" sacrifice their real meaning in order to articulate our nuanced intentions. They, in and of themselves, become glib, cliche -- while at the same time almost necessary for expression online."

Victoria Clarke, in her analysis of telnet talkers, states that capitalization is important when people write "LOL", and that "a user who types LOL may well be laughing louder than one who types lol", and opines that "these standard expressions of laughter are losing force through overuse". Egan describes LOL, ROTFL, and other initialisms as helpful as long as they are not overused. He recommends against their use in business correspondence because the recipient may not be aware of their meanings, and because in general neither they nor emoticons are (in his view) appropriate in such correspondence. June Hines Moore shares that view. So, too, does Lindsell-Roberts, who gives the same advice of not using them in business correspondence, "or you won't be LOL".