An obituary for letter E

Joshua Stein writes the obituary for the letter E:

"The letter E, an influential vowel and one of the most frequently used letters in the English language, died yesterday. It was 2,800 years old. The cause was obsolescence in the face of emerging technology, said the letter’s next of kin, the letter F.

Long considered one of the most influential letters in the Roman alphabet, at the turn of the century E had originally been heralded as the signal letter in the digital world. But in recent years, the letter had suffered a series of debilitating setbacks that closely correlated with the rise of online applications. It died May 20, 2013.

As recently as 1998, the letter was voted both “Word of the Year” and “Most Likely to Succeed” by the American Dialect Society. (It narrowly defeated the phrase “sexual relations” by a vote of 31 to 28.) In awarding the distinction, the organization noted the letter’s prolific role in words describing burgeoning online technology like e-mail, e-commerce, and e-tailing.

But in 2004, Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake founded Flickr, a photograph-sharing application, without the standard penultimate E. ...Soon many startups began jettisoning their Es like toxic assets. In 2009, Grindr, a geosocial network application for gay men, chose to make do without the letter E. Membership quickly swelled. Myriad other brands followed suit, including Blendr, Gathr, Pixlr, Readr, Timr, Viewr, Pushr.

And of course, there is the blogging platform Tumblr, whose launch in 2007 may have marked the true end of E. “There are a variety of reasons why Tumblr contains no E, from branding considerations to environmental factors (fewer letters mean lower power consumption by our servers),” said the company’s editorial director, Christopher Price. “At the end of the day, however, it all comes down to one simple, absolute truth: Tumbler.com looks fucking stupid.”

The decline in E-ness was also hastened by the realities of venture capitalists. “You take out the E from your company name, and you increase the valuation by millions,” said Lockhart Steele, the founder of Curbed, a lifestyle publishing empire. “Being E-free,” agrees Esther Dyson, a venture capitalist and an early investor in Flickr, “distinguishes you from the run-of-the-mill vowel-infested world.”

According to some linguists, the writing has been on the wall for years. “What you are seeing is a very natural process – the omission of the letter in final unstressed syllables before /r/, is something that has been a feature of written English since Anglo-Saxon times,” said Professor David Crystal, OBE, a linguist and author of Internet Linguistics. 

The letter E was born in the late 8th century BC in Athens, Greece. His father, the Phoenician letter He, died between 323 BC and 31 BC. E travelled widely throughout the Western world.

E is survived by his brothers, A, I, O and U; three daughters, é, ẻ, ě; and a son, ẹ."