I’m still utterly baffled by the OP. How can you be reading a grammar & usage manual and not know what language it’s referring to? All I can imagine is that it’s not intended as pedantry, it’s intended as some kind of weak joke that there’s a French word email that predates the English word email?
The French ballet Coppélia (1870) is subtitled “la Fille aux yeux d’émail”, the girl with enamel eyes. Coppélia has enamel eyes because she’s a life-size mechanical doll but it’s possible that someone could mistake “émail” for her eye color?
Thanks. I don’t speak French, but I’ve seen the word for enamel spelled émaillé. Is the added -lé a case marker or something?
No, it’s a past participle — “enameled.”
Ah, ok. Thanks!
No. It. Doesn’t. The French word for enamel is émail. Spell it right and there’s no possibility of confusion.
You may think me a prig for insisting on the accent diacritic, but without that it just isn’t French. Including the accent is not optional.
Pretty clear that the pedant mentioned in the OP has it wrong; email (or enamel) is not a colour, but a characteristic that a colour may have - glossy, metallic, with the appearance of a colour created by applying enamel to metal.
The OED records email as a loan-word from French into English, meaning “enamel”, and notes that it is obsolete. The last cite is from 1684.
The word survived in email ink, a particular kind of ink for application to glass, metal, porcelain, etc. Email ink was coloured, but it could be any colour. And email ombrant is the name of an artistic technique for decorating pottery in “which a transparent coloured glaze is poured over an etched or stamped design, the impressions of the design appearing as shadows”. Again, colour, but no particular colour.
Oh, and electronic mail in French is “courriel” (paper mail is “courrier”.) Which led to the delightful neologism “pourriel” for “spam”: from “courriel” combined with “poubelle” for garbage can. (Yes, in French, even the word for garbage can is dainty…)
They were pushing “courriel” hard when I lived in France (1999-2000) but in conversation, nearly everyone said “email” with a French accent. I had heard that the “courriel” movement was mostly dead these days, but is that not true?
I think that’s exactly what it is. I really hope the OP sends a link to this thread to the pedant in question.
Also, although I have prescriptivist tendencies, I gave up the fight on “e-mail” vs “email” many years ago now - “email” is just neater, there is no need for the hyphen any more as there is very little possibility of confusion with either the French word (given it has an accent) or the obsolete English word. Using “e-mail” today is almost on a par with using “to-day” today.
Good analogy. I finally dropped the hyphen about 10–12 years ago. It’s hard to believe now, but 200 years ago the big city on the Hudson was hyphenated “New**-**York” (known to readers of Washington Irving).
The German word doesn’t have diacritics: “das Email”, “Deutsche Email Verband”, “Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik” (DEF)
Slightly strange when I first saw it – and that was before e-mail. Another strange one was photocopie: I thought that was French, but perhaps I was wrong: they seem to be using facsimilé and télécopie now.
Oh, absolutely not. I don’t think that at all—I know it. Only a prig employs that construction, after all.
I say this as a gesture of professional courtesy from one prig to another. 
P.S. I’m totally with you: the diacritics matter. It’s not quite the same thing, but my local Trader Joe’s once promoted a special French cheese with a little in-store sign describing the cheese and the producer. Whoever drew that sign decided that the cheese was called “Fromager Depuis.”
Of course, that means “cheesemaker since.” Baffled, I checked the real label, and saw the mistake: there was text saying “Cheesemaker since 1771,” but that was NOT the name of the cheese!
In French, photocopie is the noun for a photocopy (as in Xerox). There’s also photocopier (the verb, pronounced like fotocopiay) and photocopieur (noun for the copying device). The other two words you mention are for faxes.
:smack: Of course you’re right. I was thinking of synonym. Senior moment.
In French, émail is not a word for a particular color (like red, blue, etc.), but in the context of heraldry, it’s a word that can be translated by the English word color.
The hues available in traditional heraldry are called tinctures in English, couleurs in modern French. They are divided into three types, the two metals being argent (silver or white) and or (gold or yellow); the five colors (in the strict technical sense), which are vert or sinople (green), sable (black), gules (red), azure (blue), and purpure (purple); and the two furs which are ermine and vair (the latter representing the fur of the red squirrel). In addition, there are several “stains” that are less traditional.
This brings us to the technical use in heraldry of the French word émail (plural émaux). It is the equivalent of the English technical term color (i.e., vert, sable, gules, azure, or purpure).
I think you’ve got it, this must be the context that we’re not seeing the OP. The pedant is railing against the (English) usage “email” without a hyphen, insisting that it should be written “e-mail”; and to support the prescription, making the weak joke that if you omit the hyphen you are not referring to electronic communication, you’re writing the French word “émail”.
Yeah, even the Associated Press Style Guide has deprecated “e-mail” in favor of “email.” And this is the style guide that – as late as the mid-1990s favored “teen-ager” for “teenager.” (Looks like they finally changed that in 2002). So if the AP is using “email” and you’re still using “e-mail,” you are a few decades behind the times.
This has been a great thread, everyone! Thanks so much for all the information!
Yes, this is the context of that section of the usage guide except that I don’t believe that he was attempting a joke (which is not acceptable on whatever planet he is from). The pedant was making a point about clarity in writing. He implied that readers would not be confused by “e-mail”, which has one definition, but would be confused by “email”, which has “at least two” definitions.
The interesting thing about this discussion is that his point about punctuation can only be made by removing accent marks. One would think that pedantry of this level would prevent him from doing so.