Rich,
>Increasingly MSU treats e-mail as official. It's really important
>to be able to forward your MSU e-mail to a professional service, as
>opposed to <http://mail.msu.edu>mail.msu.edu. Since
><http://mail.msu.edu>mail.msu.edu is amateur, MSU needs to make it
>easy to forward to a professional service.
As a fan of William Safire, you will appreciate that both MSU's and
Google's e-mail services, by definition, are "professional" in the
sense that both are designed and managed by paid staff who might even
make a living at it. Oh sure, sense 4 of "professional" in my online
American Heritage Dictionary does say, "Having or showing great
skill; expert", but doesn't such usage dilute its main sense and
divert linguistic fuss-budgets like me from your main point? If we
want to deride the design of any e-mail service, perhaps we should
consult our collective thesauri and pick a more artful term :).
(Oh, and thanks for the link to your blog about your contribution to
William Safire, I enjoyed that.)
-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder
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