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French Mind Police At It Again
Goodbye "e-mail," the French government says, and hello "courriel" — the term that linguistically sensitive France is now using to refer to electronic mail in official documents.
Who says the French are arrogant and pushy?
The Culture Ministry has announced a ban on the use of "e-mail" in all government ministries, documents, publications or Web sites, the latest step to stem an incursion of English words into the French lexicon.
Small cameras will be installed in every home within France that is connected to the internet, in order to enforce the ban...
The ministry’s General Commission on Terminology and Neurology Neology insists Internet surfers in France are broadly using the term "courrier electronique" (electronic mail) instead of e-mail — a claim some industry experts dispute. "Courriel" is a fusion of the two words.
You will think and write our way, or you will be assimilated.
"Evocative, with a very French sound, the word ’courriel’ is broadly used in the press and competes advantageously with the borrowed ’mail’ in English," the commission has ruled.
Sheesh. I shall projectile vomit now.
The move to ban "e-mail" was announced last week after the decision was published in the official government register on June 20. Courriel is a term that has often been used in French-speaking Quebec, the commission said. The 7-year-old commission has links to the Academie Francaise, the prestigious institution that has been one of the top opponents of allowing English terms to seep into French.
Hmmm. I guess that projectile vomiting is better than explosive diarrhea, which is what the French government is spewing.
Some Internet industry experts say the decision is artificial and doesn’t reflect reality.
Oh really?
"The word ’courriel’ is not at all actively used," Marie-Christine Levet, president of French Internet service provider Club Internet, said Friday. "E-mail has sunk in to our values."
Thank you.
She said Club Internet wasn’t changing the words it uses. "Protecting the language is normal, but e-mail’s so assimilated now that no one thinks of it as American," she said. "Courriel would just be a new worthless word to launch."
Ahh, the French. Sometimes I think fondly of the days when the Nazis crushed them in two weeks.

Let me say it before the Rantburg mind police do: ‘Peshawar’
Posted by: TJ 2003-07-18
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=16667