In the News Archive

This is why I always smile whenever I hear a pundit claim his or her pet company "does no evil" or has "moral standards". Companies are guided by one thing, and one thing alone: money. They have no morals. They have no moral compass. We see evidence of this every single day - whether it's poor working conditions in low-wage countries, scummy tax evasion techniques, or stuff like this, which is essentially robbing hard-working people of their money.

It's important to note, though, that the way companies work in our society has also been a major factor in the development of our wealth, luxury, and scientific progress; so no, it's not all bad. However, I do wish companies would stop spouting the obvious nonsense that they "do no evil" or have "moral standards", when it's clear to everyone with more than two brain cells to rub together that that's just a bunch of marketing bullshit. I really feel for the people that actually believe that nonsense.

Of course, the criminals responsible for the illegal behaviour described in the article should be put behind bars. Sadly, that won't happen.

A potentially very lucrative market.

Finally.

So, The New York Times has updated its style guide, and the most intriguing change - for me - is that NYT editors are now allowed to spell e-mail as 'email'.

E-mail is actually a very problematic word in Dutch as well. Technically speaking, 'e-mail' is an abbreviation of 'electronic mail'. In Dutch, compound nouns consisting of a loose letter or acronym combined with a regular noun are always hyphenated (for instance, we write 'tv-zender', which means 'TV channel'). This means that the the noun 'e-mail' is always hyphenated in Dutch. This is where it gets interesting.

Many Dutch people, especially in casual writing, spell 'e-mail' without a hyphen. Personally, I would never do this, since correct spelling and grammar is a huge part of my job (I'm a translator with my own little translation business), but it's still quite common. This is quite problematic because 'email' without a hyphen means something completely different. 'Email', in Dutch, means 'enamel', as in tooth enamel. For language geeks such as myself, reading "Ik stuur je wel even een email" ("I'll send you an enamel") is weirdly hilarious.

The hyphenation rule regarding compound nouns with single letters or acronyms is a very solid rule in Dutch, and it's unlikely an exception will be made for e-mail.

We can go even deeper into the intricacies of the Dutch language. Obviously, 'e-mail' can function both as a noun and as a verb - which, obviously, can be conjugated. This is where the idiosyncrasies of the Dutch language really start adding up, leading to what can only be regarded as one of the biggest abominations recently added to Dutch. Here's a summarised present tense/paste tense conjugation of the Dutch verb 'e-mailen':

So far, so good - this doesn't look very weird to native Dutch speakers. Now let's take a look at the past participle, used in a present perfect (as a sidenote: I'm not sure I'm using the correct English grammatical terms for all the tenses - I purposefully unlearned those years ago because I found they interfered with my instinctive ability to form proper English tenses).

Double hyphen! Even though this is correct, proper Dutch verb conjugation and spelling, many language experts will actually advise against using this, urging people to come up with workarounds ("Ik heb een e-mail gestuurd"; "I have sent an e-mail") instead. The weird thing is that in speech, 'ge-e-maild' sounds perfectly fine; in writing, however, it looks like you're stuttering while choking on a chili pepper. It's just... Wrong. Even though it's correct.

There are more instances like this, where the rise of computer technology and the dominance of English has spawned some seriously disturbing Dutch verb conjugations (my personal favourite: 'ge-ftp'd'). These clearly look alien and foreign to us Dutch today, and only time will tell if they ever get assimilated into Dutch spelling in such a way that they will lose their alien nature.

The newspaper told the government that even if they did comply, it would be pointless - all the materials related to Snowden had already been spread throughout the world, the actual editing was done in New York, the journalist in question (Greenwald) lived in Brazil - but the British government stood fast.

Yeah.