This column sponsored by the letter 'e'

JAKARTA (JP): Ask Miss Vanna White the vowel that players on Wheel of Fortune would buy on their first chance? Her answer would most likely be, "The fifth character of the Roman alphabet."

That's because the vowel "e" is the most frequently occurring in the English language. As it is, this vowel is problematic to foreign speakers of English such as myself. How should I, for instance, pronounce e? Why does the sound of e differ so much in words such as enough, endemic, sovereign and reindeer? And now, as if things weren't complicated enough already, people have been throwing a seemingly endless stream of new e's -- with or without a dash -- into the English language. They call the assault on the language "e-novation".

When people sell and buy goods over the Internet, they call it "e-commerce", or "e-trade", if you will. When retailers open their outlets on the Internet, they call themselves "e-tailers". Their competitors are called "e-rivals".

When they promote their products and services on the Internet and link up with their suppliers, customers and partners, they call it "e-business". On your birthday, they send you an e-card, which is usually preceded by their e-mail. All of these activities certainly require a special combination of computing and networking hardware, software and humanware, and they have a collective name for this: e-nfrastructure.

They have started offering banking services through the Internet, and they call their money "e-cash". Before you can start using it, you'll have to be able to prove to them that you are you, because unless you're completely e-credible, they will not have the required e-trust to do business with you or honor your e-check. On the positive side, now that they've enabled you to go to automatic teller machines without hopping into your car or racing your motorbike, these e-banks have, to a certain extent, achieved their environment-related e-mission of reducing emission.

People now sell digital books over the Internet. All you have to do is download the file and read them on a portable gadget called the "e-book". When R. E. "Teddy" Turner IV decided to create a media empire of his own, he began selling e-TV door-to- door. It's a set-top Internet box that allows people to turn their TV into some kind of computer and Web device. Thank God nobody has called it "a mix of e-ducation and e-ntertainment". That would be stretching it.

You don't roam the Internet and call it "e-travel", yet. That kind of "beam me up" journey will have to wait until particle transport technology becomes available. Today, e-travel only means that you buy your plane tickets and book your hotel rooms through the Web, not through your old and faithful travel agent. You can easily do this thanks to the availability of all the facilities offered by the Web -- search engines, Web crawlers, and Web-based services, which you call "e-tools".

And those entrepreneurs who aspire to replicate the luck and fortune of Yahoo founder Jerry Yang and the like are jumping on the e-bandwagon like crazy. They offer children's toys on the Internet, and they call their virtual stores "e-Toys". They do some marketing on the Net and they call themselves "e-marketers". The more I observe the perfectly e-legal activities of these people, the more I feel that it's turning me into an e- materialist. All this has already become daunting and e-culture has not even reached e-maturity.

Surely the e-generation -- who are strongly characterized by their e-mobility -- have no choice but make sure they are fully e-literate (watch it, folks! I didn't say "illiterate"). That's because adding "e-" in front of every possible English word now seems to be gaining e-legitimacy (no, not illegitimacy).

I guess by now you've begun to see the underlying problem with the e-legibility of these e-words. It's just fortunate nobody has used the words "e-migration", "e-logic" and "e-rationality", because these would certainly cause a lot of confusion. Just imagine what your reaction would be if some entrepreneur said to you: "No other Internet business could be as proud as we are of our e-morality!" For exactly the same reason I don't believe PT Aqua Golden Mississippi, the company which sells us Aqua drinking water, will ever start a Web site and call it "e-Liquid". Such a name would simply stir too much e-motion.

Folks, if anybody should be blamed for further corrupting this already unwieldy language, I think it should be Cisco Systems, Compaq, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and all those companies which have been so aggressive in e-merging words just to give us e-llustrations of what people can do in the e-world.

-- Zatni Arbi