First there was email. Then things like e-business, e-solutions, evite and e-lance (to freelance on the internet) came scampering through the lexicon, and I thought to myself, "By Jove! That's a productive prefix!" Voila! Cen is a genius! I proceeded to bombard my morphology professor Su with emails regarding 'e.' I had recently learned about lexical suffixes, which don't occur in English but are heavily used in some of the local First Nations languages, and it seemed to me that 'e' functions more as a lexical prefix than anything else.
'e' is productive, which means that it can be added to other words in the language and mean something. I define 'e' to mean "facilitated though use of the internet" or something along those lines. So I could take any number of open class words (since it's my half-baked theory, I'm going to limit these to nouns and verbs) and add the prefix 'e' to it, and you, dear reader would understand what I mean. In the same way that 'e' added to the word 'mail' has come to mean "mail received via the internet," these other randomly chosen verbs and nouns can take on new internet meanings as well. Take a look at this table (all examples are completely off the top of my head):
| Word | Lexical Category | Projected Meaning |
| stalk | verb | e-stalk: to stalk online E.g. via email or IM |
| mope | verb | e-mope: to mope online. E.g. excessive use of crying smileys |
| bamboozle | verb | e-bamboozle: to bamboozle online. E.g. to charge ridiculous prices, steal credit card numbers or be nasty in any way with regards to money on the internet |
| pet | noun | e-pet: a pet which exists on the internet(see e-poop) |
| chalkboard | noun | e-chalkboard: some feat of technology which performs the same functions online as a real chalkboard might perform in the physical realm |
| tv | noun | e-tv: tv programming which is available on the internet |
© 2004 - Carolyn Campbell