Vous Got Mail France's Ministry of Culture has banned the word e-mail. Henceforth, at least for the purposes of affaires d'Etat - government documents, publications and Web sites – the French term courrier électronique, or the snappy contraction courriel, will be de rigueur. "Evocative, with a very French sound, the word 'courriel' is broadly used in the press and competes advantageously with the borrowed 'mail' in English," says a statement from the Ministry, translated by the Associated Press.
A pedant might point out that the noting that mail in un-French is a canard. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word mail has its origins in the Middle French malle, meaning " a courier's bag for letters."
The French don't seem to object to e-mail's E for electronic - barely distinguishable from électronique - but maybe they should. Electronic is derived from electron, which was coined in 1891 by George Johnstone Stoney, and Irish physicist. Stoney derived electron from electric, a word that comes to us from Greek via Latin. Since French itself is a Latinate language, it would seem the Ministry of Culture is willing to stomach électronique in spite of its connections to l'ile verte.
All of this strikes an English speaker as très stupide. What makes English great, after all, is its openness to new words from all over the world. Whereas English is the melting pot of languages, the French seem to view their tongue as a soufflé – exquisitely delicate and always in danger of falling. Early in the 20th century, French was one of the world's premier languages. Is it any wonder that by the fin de siècle English had surpassed it to become the undisputed lingua franca?
