'H' and 'Emails'

While there are a number of quirks present in the English language, recent argument with my wife and brother have invoked the urge to vent my deep rooted resent of two particular oddities. Without further ado, here they are in all their odious glamour:

• The pronunciation of the letter 'H'.
• Use of the word email in cases refering to a singular electronic message.

First off, who came up with the pronunciation of the letter H? While the letter 'X' is understandably screwed and was advertised as such at the Kindergarten grade level, the letter 'H' was panned off as a pretty normal consonant. Well franctly it isn't. The correct pronunciation of the letter 'H' doesn't contain the consonant sound found in words like Hector or Huberous. The pronunciation is more akin to the sound found in the word agent. I have just now stumbled upon the problem associated with this consonant, due to my own self correction of how the letter is pronounced. It seems that in my efforts to avoid picking up a soft southern accent I have begun pronouncing it much like the 'H' in Hay.

I was first informed of my mispronunciation of this letter by my wife, who is also a Kindergarten teacher. I agree that her pronunciation is probably the widely accepted one, but mine sounds better, is more clear and actually contains the consonant sylable of the letter that it designates. What could be better? With this said, I think I will continue pronouncing 'H' as pronounched in the word Hay. I'm right and the rest of the world is wrong! Okay, enough 'h' already.

My second hang-up is with the widespread use of the word 'email' in instances where it refers to a singular electronic message. For example: " I sat at my desk sending dozens of emails today". The word 'email' was originally created to refer to electronic mail in the plural sense but when the masses got ahold of it in the mid 90's they simply couldn't grow their technical dictionary to also include words such as e-letters or e-messages. I didn't suffer from this retardation so I started using 'e-letter' and 'e-message' for quite a while after the advent of widespread internet. Funnily I suffered quite a bit of stigma from those who though email was the one and only allowable term for discretely packaged internet messaging. It got to the point where I had to purposely use email for the singular case to avoid idiots from being confused from my correctitude. It's been a while since I used the term 'e-letter', probably because I don't use e-mail very much and I find myself surrounded more and more by total idiots.

It's a shame that my infinite colloquial perfection doesn't rub off on the rest of the world. It would certainly be a better place.