Internet, Web, and Other Post-Watergate Concerns
Q. I edit documents used in the healthcare informatics domain, where e-health, eHealth, e-community, e-practice, and other ever-growing variations on the “e-” are present. If the “e-” or the “e” plus a word begins a sentence, I am capitalizing that darn “e.” Otherwise, it looks very strange. Am I correct?
A. For generic e-constructions, we agree:
So far, it has proved impossible to send e-mail without some form of electricity.
E-mail is ubiquitous enough that in several years people may simply call it “mail.”
For a proper name, however, we are not so sure. Take “eBay.” The name of the company is “eBay,” not “EBay,” and some of us would argue that the lowercase “e” is an important characteristic of that name. Moreover, goes the argument, the word is already capitalized: eBay is a proper noun, therefore it is capitalized, and the capitalization falls on the B. Nonetheless, we at Chicago prefer capitalizing the first word in a sentence; “de Gaulle” becomes “De Gaulle” in that position. So,
I found a simply superb example of the eleventh edition of CMOS—known then as A Manual of Style—on eBay yesterday.
EBay is a slick company.
but some—including eBay itself it seems—would prefer
eBay is a slick company.
We side with the capital E.
