Effective at 3 a.m. EDT Saturday, March 19, the Associated Press changed its usage rules in the following ways:

• email, instead of e-mail. (Other “e” terms, such as e-book and e-commerce, retain the hyphen,)

• Kolkata, India, instead of Calcutta, India. To follow local style.

• cellphone, smartphone become one word. (No longer cell phone and smart phone.)

• handheld, n., hand-held, adj.

I absolutely  l-o-v-e  that AP announced these changes at the annual conference of the American Copy Editing Society, which concluded yesterday in Phoenix. I attended ACES conventions is Portland, Dallas, and Baltimore, and was a member for almost a decade. There is no place more appropriate for AP to promulgate such changes than before the world's foremost defenders of style in language.

Meanwhile, I recall — from Dallas, I think — the strong opinion of Washington Post copy editing maven Bill Walsh, during his usage presentation, that "email" was absurd and that one needed the hyphen, always. That was a while ago, though, and I only mention it as an example of how use evolves.