B) as letters have done in the past C) what sort of communication we all used before the coming of the e-mail D) what sort of status do e-mails have in your opinion E) you met briefly but got on with F) because the phone could have been too expensive G) as e-mails are so easy to send What intrigues me is
1 ____________ . Was it the phone or the letter? Or do we now have more
contacts with people than we used to simply
2 ____________ ? Or maybe the letter was too much of
an effort? In the old days, people
3 ____________ would say: “Keep in touch. Give me a bell.
Drop me a line”. But did you? Do you now keep in touch with e-mail?
Then of course not all occasions are suitable for e-mails. Would you write an e-mail of sympathy to
someone w hose loved one had died? Take another example. Would you send a love e-mail? A love
letter, well that’s something different. People look back over those in later life and treasure them.
But would you save your love e-mails and keep them in a little box? Is it likely that an e-mail will
acquire a historical significance in the future
4 ____________ ? In this country sometimes an e-mail
between important political figures is ‘leaked’
5 ____________ . That rarely happened with letters.
Again we have all seen and read books containing the collected letters of famous writers, artists,
politicians and the like.
Can you imagine a book containing the collected e-mails of similar figures in the future? And what
about the word ‘e-mail’ itself? We can use it as a noun and a verb and possibly call someone who
sends one an e-mailer. What would we use to describe the equivalent of correspondence? Could it
be ‘e-mailings’ or again ‘e-mailery’? What I’d really like to know is
