'Sending' an e-Mail

What’s happened lately with e-mail speak? Yesterday I overheard a colleague on the telephone saying that he would ‘bang’ an e-mail over later. Earlier on a female client had told me she’d ‘pop’ me an e-mail and yet another colleague tends to ‘ping’ e-mails! What’s that all about? What’s the obsession with delivering emails in a flurry of perceived uproar or commotion? Maybe I am just old fashioned and haven’t got past the ‘SEND’ option for emails yet. Mind you, I can hardly be blamed for that since my e-mail software does not yet have a bang, pop or ping option as the method of delivery. I have to say, if someone tells me they will be ‘banging’ me over an e-mail I usually take precautions and sit well back from the computer monitor prior to its delivery.

Perhaps the psychology of it all is to make a relatively innocuous task seem a lot more important by applying an onomatopoeic noun to the deed. The aforementioned colleague has also been heard to say that he would ‘bang out’ an e-mail. I do worry for his IT budget if his keyboard takes such a hammering. Maybe it makes the, dare I use the word, ‘sender’, seem more crucial to the process as if the action of applying pressure with a single finger to a keyboard button demonstrates some contained power. A bit like the President of the United States hitting the nuclear button! It could even be that, in the mindset of the sender, the use of more powerful words imparts much more significance to the content. So, the more badly written and the more lightweight the content of the e-mail, the greater the need to use a powerful noun to imply gravitas. For example if you were to write ‘ hello mate. Hows ur weekend. I will get the parcel of to u in the morning’, you would need to explain to the recipient that you were going to ‘explode’ an email over to him in order to create importance and consequently engender any anticipation.

Having said all of the above I now feel some pressure to up my game in the e-mail vernacular stakes. I may well stop using such a passive and uninspiring word as ‘send’ to denote the method by which I will be providing information to you via cyber space and look at something more descriptive. The fact that communication goes via cyber space therefore lends itself to space related terminology and in future I may warn you that I am about to ‘launch’ an e-mail - as in, 'I will launch you an e-mail shortly, mate.' As the pressure increases to express the importance of my e-mail communication I may then resort to more explosive nouns and I may propel, thrust or even blast you an e-mail. I have decided though, that for reasons of decorum, ejaculating an e-mail may not be interpreted in the truest definition and therefore I will avoid that one, as indeed everyone else should!!!