Interesting. When I first started learning French (in the US), loanwords like “email” were the default even in the textbooks. Presumably the native French ones would have both, and explain what the “proper” term (courriel?) should be?
If you look it up in the official Academy dictionary, it does indeed say to prefer “courriel” to “mail”/“mél”, and this term may be officially obligatory or something in some institutions, but have you heard it in the wild? Seems like informal/abbreviated language, in any case, as opposed to writing out “courrier électronique”.
Seems like small potatoes, anyway, compared to official acts like massive spelling reform, vocabulary/grammar reform, or changing the entire alphabet.
So what does bi-bliographic mean?
I’ve certainly seen “courriel” used in emails at my Canadian job.
External Email: Use caution with links and attachments. | Courriel externe: Faites preuve de prudence en ce qui a trait aux liens et aux pieces jointes.
Indeed, this appears to be a Canadian coinage.
i think I’ve seen courriel-e somewhere. It makes sense.
But usage changes. When I was growing up (say 75 years ago) the word inflammable (i.e able to be inflamed) played the role that flammable does to-day. Non-inflammable was the negative. But it was confusing for people not aware of the meaning and—for good reason—it was replaced by flammable. Just use non-flammable, not inflammable, for the negation.
Ooh, even more fun are contronyms — words that mean their own opposites (during the same time period), like:
- Cleave can mean “to cling” or “to split apart”.[3][6]
- Clip can mean “attach” or “cut off”.[3]
- Drop can mean “release or make available” (e.g. a music record) or “abandon or discontinue”.[7]
- Dust can mean “to remove dust” (e.g. to clean a house) or “to add dust” (e.g. to dust a cake with powdered sugar).[3][6]
I wonder what the prescriptivist take on those are…
Similarly, are shelled peanuts peanuts with shells on them, or peanuts from which the shells have been removed?
Whichever sense is the oldest is the one to accept forever.
Amelia Bedelia missed that memo…
Is that a prescriptivist position?
Having to do with two books, of course. 
Does bibimbap then mean every two double mbaps? Inquiring minds must know.
Wrong. It means one book twice.
Doesn’t it mean half a book once?
That saved me from writing all of that out. Thanks.
In my industry, that word is used a lot - to mean twice a month.
OK. Let’s say it was “electrocuted” or “drowned”. The question then becomes… is it dead? Cuz folks be using these words different-like these days.
Also-- re: the whole prescriptionist / descriptionist thing: how do we deal with two different people using two entirely different, or even opposite, meanings of a word?
“Yes, I said a black cat. And as you know, black is the color of fresh snowfall.”
Nobody can ever be wrong about a word’s definition—it’s whatever you say it is–so that seems to lead to a lot of confunsion.
If a significant number of people started using “black” for “the color of fresh snowfall”, while others continued to use it for the color of coal, then yes, there would be a problem. But is that happening? And even if it were happening, would prescriptionism actually solve the problem?
The black/white thing was an extreme example to make my point but smaller examples are still problems. If I read that someone has drowned I don’t know if they are alive or not. I guess I can hunt for additional details…
I guess I like it when you don’t have to do additional research just to find out what someone intends to say. If it’s all a free-for-all where we can define any word any way we want to I wish we could adopt words that are more useful and with less chance of misunderstandings.
But what happens when the two competing definitions are 50/50 on their usage distribution? Do you just ask every person which definition they mean? Seems to lose the whole point of using words to describe things.
OK, but the question is still, would prescriptivism solve the problem? Even if I say that the people using “black” to mean “snow-colored” are wrong, it won’t stop them from doing so.