Not the Point
By Michael Swaine
E-business and e-commerce. E-buys on eBay. Email about e-tail. E-books, e-zines, e-fishwrap: At some point one gets tired of all the e-thises and e-thats. It's just dead media and moribund companies praying for resurrection through e-ification. E-nough!
Enough. And yet, a furlong farther along that dimension of disgruntlement you realize that there has been enough enoughing, too. You have, you conclude, read more than enough rants about how there are more than enough e-thises and e-thats. This is not that. I stand before you now, in a manner of speaking, not as yet another columnist with nothing better to be bitter about, beating the dead horse of e-neology.
This is a horse of a different choler.
To rail about the plethora of e-words misses the point. The point that it misses is that these e-words themselves all miss the point. And the point that all these e-words miss, if you'll follow me just this one point further, is that they are not with it at all, but sadly out of it. Check the dictionary:
E-, a prefix meaning "out of." Variant of ex-.
The lexicographers nailed that one. E is out, or ought to be, and it's about to be outed.
E means electronic. A book is information on paper, an e-book is the same information in another medium. E-words merely substitute one physical medium for another, as though the changes that commerce and publishing are going through were merely about moving to a new medium.
The medium is not the message. That was yesterday. The message today is that message is independent of medium.
