A couple of years ago someone was arrested for passing off fake money. According to di-ve.com, the branch of the police carrying out the investigation was “the department of economic riots” – ie Reati Ekonomici.

I think they or someone else were subsequently “condemned of all the accuses brought against them”.

Compound words anyone? <—

Sorry I meant any-one.

Who said problem is feminine? [Daphne – It’s feminine only in Maltese, because of our simplistic rules which dictate that anything ending in ‘a’ is feminine. It should be masculine.] I’ve heard quite a few people, admittedly of an older generation, saying “dak il-problema”, but then you’d accuse them of being pro-Italian fascists. [Daphne – No, they’re correct. ‘Problema’ should be masculine not because of the corollary with Italian, but because it is a word of Greek origin, and masculine. For the same reason, radio is feminine, not masculine, except in the language of the uneducated Maltese. And the rest have to end up repeating the error lest it be thought that they are the ones who are mistaken.]

Having said that, at the risk of going down in a ball of flame, I think you’re conflating analogies. The email/e-mail debate is quite a bit different from the gender usage issue, which is more analagous to the bwietz thing.

As you said it takes years, but in the case of specialist or niche words, you have to factor in the years the word spends in that specific domain. Some of us having been working online for over 20 years. When I started I used to write computer programmes, but very soon it was programs. [Daphne – I know. I noticed that my son does the same thing. All it means is that you are using American English rather than British English, because American English dominates the field in which you work.] Is it correct or desirable? Maybe not, but it just is.

On the other hand, to demonstrate that it’s a Friday afternoon, I’ve carried out the same search restricted to specific web sites, British & American, technical and non-technical, and the results are:

London Times: email wins 421000 to 78000
Washington Post: e-mail wins 1090000 to 743000

So bizarrely, the British have taken to a simplifying change in spelling faster than the Americans. [Daphne – Not exactly, and forgive me for being anally retentive but words are my big thing. ‘Email’ is an entirely new noun: a new word coined for something that didn’t exist before. E-mail, on the other hand, is short for electronic mail and remains a truncated form of the adjective + noun, hence the hyphen. I use ’email’ because the idea that it is a new noun, rather than a truncated adjective+noun, appeals to me.]

But then if you make the same comparison with the electronic media:

CNN, email wins 1180000 to 544000
BBC, e-mail wins 462,000 to 64400

It’s the other way round.

Then the technical ones, tie and jacket companies, the grampaws:

Microsoft, e-mail wins 1180000 to 762000
IBM, e-mail wins 440000 to 263000

But the jeans and sneakers crowd, the cool (it the IT world) and modern ones:

Google, email wins 2700000 to 265000
Sun Microsystems, email wins 1950000 to 27800

And last but not least, in Malta:

The Times, email wins 54300 to 191
The Malta Independent, email wins 2610 to 740 – Mostly yours?

(I’m not going to bother with di-ve.com – they of “the department of economic riots”) [Daphne – What?]

And in total it’s 8140310 to 4087731 in favour of email, so I’m thinking we can say that apart from the fact that I should be spending less time at a keyboard (key-board?) email has pretty much made it as a word in its own right.

It has probably already changed, at least online, if not off-line. Googling the terms, (you need to search for +”e-mail” -email to get numbers for e-mail, as it would otherwise also include email) gets you the following:

email, 2.8billion hits, e-mail 2billion
online, 3.7billion, on-line 0.4 billion
offline 1.2billion, off-line 0.2 billion

Now, does popular usage make a language? If so its changed already.

[Daphne – Do you know why Maltese is the only European language in which radio is masculine and problem is feminine? That’s right: popular usage based on ignorance.]

[Daphne – It has to be hyphenated, for the same reason that ‘straight-haired’ and ‘brown-skinned’ are hyphenated: a straight-haired woman, a brown-skinned man and an on-line article. Eventually, perhaps it will become one word, as some exceptions do – offshore and onshore. It will take years and might never happen. You’ll notice that neither offshore nor onshore is hyphenated, but there is no word ‘offline’, just off-line. Off-line and on-line work together, so you can’t have ‘online’ but then ‘off-line’.]

Takes all sorts.

[Daphne – The fact that some people write on-line as one word does not mean it is any more correct than, say, ‘bwietz’ for boots. Popular usage does not make for correctness. If online were correct, then it stands to reason that offline would be, too. But it isn’t. If off-line is written in hyphenated form, then on-line should be, too.]