Anonymous:

1) I'm certainly not suggesting that the word ought not to change in the future according to popular usage! lol...

2) I got the non-hyphenated "D day" from the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary. They actually give no hyphenated alternative within the definition. If you disagree. you may wish to take it up with them.

Actually, there's a perfectly sound and consistent reason why "e-mail" should be hyphenated.

Most compound words in English in which the first part of the compound is represented by its first letter follow this rule: H-bomb (for "hydrogen bomb"), G-string (for "genital" or "guitar" string, stories vary), f-stop (from f-number, "focal length number"), d-fructose ("dextrorotatory fructose"), etc.

All of the words that typically do not use a hyphen use a space instead ("B movie," "C ration," "D day," etc.). Many of these compounds have alternate acceptable forms that are hyphenated (for example, "D-day").

This is worth an article. I won't go into that great detail here.

Elena: It's spelled "pidgin." And a "hackney" is a taxicab.

I think you are thinking of "Cockney," which is traditionally thought of as the dialect spoken by those born within the sound of Bow bells. It was the dialect spoken by the character Eliza from "My Fair Lady," before she learned to speak like a woman of the upper class.

Mike O's observation is the same as mine. I work at a large international company, and no matter where the speaker is from, if they are speaking English, they refer to a number of pieces of e-mail as "e-mails."

Therefore, my boss in Aberdeen, for example, could be heard to complain--on a conference call to my managers in Stavanger, Houston, Rio de Janeiro, and Kuala Lumpur--that he sent out several e-mails about the meeting, but all the participants didn't show up. Everyone would know what he meant and would think his usage perfectly acceptable.

Yes, Anonymous, "mail" and "e-mail" are different words, but they are no more different from each other than are the words "white" and "off-white" or than "string" and "G-string." All of these word pairs, and the majority of similar pairs, use the same declension rules for the compound as they do for the single word.

By the way, spelling the word "email" makes no more sense than to call the dancer's thong a "gstring."

Here's a fun list, while the link lasts, of verious equivalents for "John Doe" in other languages:

http://www.words-worth.de/robin/2004/07/would-real-john-doe-please-step.php

So, passing by, I suppose that in thirty years of piano study, including three years of formal university and ten years of giving lessons, I haven't managed to figure out yet that "I play piano," as opposed to "I play THE piano."

Take your grammar book and go sit on a tack...

Oh, do you really think so?

Dave, the one and only way that that could be a correct English statement is in something like the following situation:

Say you are a secretary in HR (Human Resources, or Personnel) and you are classifying your employees into two groups that you are calling "work in office" and "work at home." Your father is an employee of your company, and he works at home. So Sally might be "work in office," and your father might be "work at home." If someone asked you what classification your father belonged to, you might tell them, "My dad is 'work at home.'"

You would still sound strange, and a better rendition would still be, "My dad works at home" or, "My dad is a 'work at home.'"

WE don't. American speakers--I mean U.S. speakers (OK, OK, Canadians, get off my case already).

I'm a secretary and I know these things. :P

I like Dave's suggestion.