Poorly named companies: “Town & Country Electric, a division of Faith Technologies Inc.”

Life repeats.

Today, I sit next to the proverbial profane personage who talks to himself (and to you) under his breath. From his mouth proceeds vain babel, uniformly fertilized with vulgarities, profanities, and curses. You know this man. You are afraid to answer him when he speaks, lest you encourage him to call down damnation on his car salesman.

When he leaves for lunch, he says “I’ll be right back!” but you don’t care. You don’t know what he was doing before lunch; you don’t know what he will be doing after lunch, but whatever it is, you know it will be funny. You don’t see the humour in it, but since he is always laughing at it you can not conclude otherwise. Yes, you sat next to this man before and you will sit next to him again.

But love is patient and kind, so you will try to be patient and kind.

It seems that the SUV Nazis may be close to winning the war. One can now easily mistake the GM mid-size SUVs (Trail Blazer, et al) for the GM minivans (Venture, et al.) In this sort of case, the interesting question is whether media pressure overcame market pressure in a knock-down drag-out. However, it’s easy to conclude that the proliferation of female SUV drivers applied market forces in the same direction as the media. The question is moot.

The United States Postal Service is amazing. Our office building is undergoing major construction. As part of this reconfiguration, the entire north-south concourse has been shut down. To get from the south side to the north side of the building now, one must go over or around the building.

Formerly, there was a mail drop located in the north-south concourse. This mailbox has been moved 50 feet west, into the catacombs of the building. The discussion has been on this wise:

“Gee, that’s an odd location for a mailbox. I wonder if the USPS know that it’s there.”

“Yeah, I wonder if they still make the rounds to pick up that mail, or if there’s mail stuck inside that will never be delivered.”

Today, while walking past that mailbox, we descried a postman walking towards us. We exclaimed, “So you *do* pick up the mail in that box!” To which the mailman replied, “Yup! Every day!”

Lately, my cause has been to eliminate improper usage of “e-mail”: Whereas “e-mail” is short for “electronic mail” and inasmuch as the electronic mail system is modeled after a real life postal system, electronic postal terms should follow those of the real-life postal system. In fact, this is the case. In the software world, we have such things as post offices, mail transit authorities, and mailboxes.

Hence, when people (including me) use the word “e-mail” to refer to a message or an address, it just doesn’t sound right. To illustrate, if you received three birthday cards in the post, you wouldn’t say to your friend, “I got three mails for my birthday.” Nor would you say to him, “What’s your mail so I can send you a thank you mail?” But we do say those things with e-mail.

So I’ve already begun using the terms “e-letter” (electronic letter) and “e-mail address” (electronic mail address), supposing that they are more acceptable. Some have balked at these terms but I insist, nay demand that we change our usage.

Now I have a new proposal which I’d like some feedback on. “Epistle” is a rarely used term for letter. I propose to use this word to describe electronic letters as well. So we end up with e-epistles. I’m not sure of it yet, what do you think?

Regarding my comments from 11/19/2004 (i.e. whether or not to spell out d— and H— when referencing their improper usages): While reading Washington Irving’s The Devil and Tom Walker I noticed that Irving (or perhaps his editors) wrote “d—-d” when the Devil used the word as a “flippant curse” but did not dash it out when the Devil used it as an actual curse. Just interesting, no more, no less.

Things that make you go “hmmmm”. In a recent column Michael Novak described some positive environmental changes that have taken place during the last century. He pointed out that we generally hear that our environment is being increasingly soiled by industry and progress, then laid out some interesting facts pointed out that industry and progress can help us care for Creation, clean it up, make it better. Well, I agree and it’s worth a read.