"E-mail?!?" Fermez ta bouche!

The French Academy has determined that the English term "e-mail" shall be strictly interdit in government documents, despite being the term in common use for those bits of text folks send back and forth. The new, approved term is courriel. An informal check by Eugene Volokh indicates that "e-mail" is about 21 times more prevalent than "courriel" on French websites.

You'd think that a group of academics as convinced as the Academy of their culture's inherent superiority wouldn't feel so very threatened by a couple of borrowed phrases. After all, we may have gone a little goofy yanking "french fries" off our restaurant menus, but, to borrow a quip from Clay Shirky, at least we still called them restaurants and menus. For what it's worth, I'm rather fond of the compromise solution we Spaniards came up with: "emilio."