It feels like the 18th century all over again. All that daily correspondence, all those long hours spent hunched over a desk, composing some thoughtful missive about one's dowry or the Jacobite rebellions. Signed, "Yr humble servant".
Same deal now, basically, except we're not clutching quills; we're writing a series of emails and clicking send on ye olde BlackBerry. And something else isn't quite the same: Unlike the heroes and heroines of epistolary novels, we aren't blessed with time-tested formal guidance on the correct way to sign off.
"Best"?
"Cheers"?
"Sincerely"?
For Daniel Morrison, CEO of the Washington-based international relief nonprofit 1Well, the wrong sign-off posed an impediment to deeper romance.
"I sent an email to a girlfriend, and she was very put off by me signing off with 'Regards', saying that I sounded very 'emotionally detached'," Morrison says via email.
"We did break up shortly thereafter, so maybe she was right."
Will Schwalbe, co-author with David Shipley of Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better, warns, "You can really do a lot of damage, even with a careless closing. And one of the terrifying things about email is: you may never know."
But you may well feel the chill.
"If you have been writing to someone 'Best' this and 'Best' that, and you get an email that is a little colder, a little hostile, and they sign 'Sincerely', that does mean things aren't so good," Schwalbe says.
" 'Sincerely' is the one that says, 'There's a problem here'."
And, one may well wonder, does "Cordially" ever mean anything other than "My hostility is only thinly veiled"?
And when, email-wise, is it too early for "Love"? Does "Fondly" ever belong in business? Is "Cheers" too mock-Brit? Too alcoholic?
So many questions, so few answers.
Craig Brownstein, vice-president of media relations at the PR firm Edelman, is a devotee of "Best" and its variants. He says he started seeing "Best" in emails a few years ago and has since picked it up. But that professional close can quickly escalate into greater e-intimacies.
Brownstein asked his research team, StrategyOne, to catalogue the most common email closing lines with an online poll. (The sample of about a thousand internet users came from a non-random pool of respondents, so these numbers are rather more food for thought than hard data.)
Although "Best" seems ubiquitous in certain email circles (Brownstein's and Schwalbe's, for instance), for some reason it was barely a blip on this survey's radar.
Twenty-five percent of participants said they closed their professional emails with "Sincerely", while 20% use some variant of "Thank you", and 17% use no closing at all. "Love" is the most common personal email closing, followed by no closing.
This all might come as no great surprise to Peter Post, author of Essential Manners for Men, and one of manner maven Emily Post's great-grandchildren. Post swears by "Sincerely", which he describes as an all-purpose, "safe" email close - the little black dress of sign-offs, if you will. "Yours truly" and "Regards" can also work, Post says, but "Best" is more dangerous territory.
"I think it's more important with `Best' that you know the person," Post says. "I think it would be very awkward to do that to a person that you only knew very slightly or hadn't yet met."
But in their book, Schwalbe and Shipley recommend "Best" and "Best wishes" as "among the most common in email safe, all-purpose ways of bringing a note to an end". Schwalbe himself often ratchets "Best" up to "Best!" with the exclamation point added to warm up a medium in which everything can unfortunately sound a wee bit frigid and humourless.
Huffington Post editor in chief Arianna Huffington, likewise, says that one can do better than "Sincerely".
"The problem," Huffington says, "with traditional sign-offs like 'Sincerely' is not so much that they're too cold as that they're like vestiges of another medium: letters... I've always used `Best' or 'All the best', because that's always been standard for me, even for letters. And I never liked 'Sincerely'; I always found it very cold."
Huffington, who signs off with "Fondly" when she's writing to older correspondents and closes emails to her daughters with kisses and hugs, says that she drops the closing with the writers, editors and friends with whom she's in near-constant communication, describing these sorts of emails as part of an ongoing conversation that encompasses everything from face-time to instant-message exchanges.
Musing on the ever-mutating art of the sign-off, Huffington says, "One thing that is kind of interesting is how more and more people are actually signing off by telling you where they are ... Like, 'Sent while being yelled at by a flight attendant to turn off all electronic devices', or `Sent while killing time in traffic', which we should NOT be doing."
Murky waters, these, unless you're fortunate enough to be, say, in the military, where specific closings are standard fare. Matthew Cox, a senior staff writer at the Army Times, says that members of the navy and the air force often close their emails with "V/R" ("Very respectfully"). For the marines, it's "S/F" (Semper Fi), while army rangers sign off with "RLTW" ("Rangers Lead the Way").
The easy-to-type-ness and communicating-of-warmth-ness of "XOXO" have proved handy for MSNBC correspondent Norah O'Donnell. She writes in an email that she started closing notes to friends with "XOXO" after she realised she'd been neglecting to sign off at all. Or, O'Donnell says, she'll close with "Warmly", since " `Sincerely' seems so formal and outdated".
Top Chef star Spike Mendelsohn, owner of Good Stuff Eatery in Washington, says, "I used to sign emails totally erratically. Like, I'd write, 'From Spike', and intentionally put a comma after my name just to rebel against grammar." Now he simply signs off with "Love and Bacon".
Whether you love bacon or puppies or flowers, a person can choose particular-to-me closings. Post fondly recalls that his sister used to sign letters (and now emails) with "WLAFR" - "With love and fondest regards."
The Rev James Schall, a professor of government at Georgetown University, says he closes all his informal correspondence with "Pray for me." ("One does," he says, "get funny reactions.")
Peter Baker, a "Best wishes" sort and an English professor at the University of Virginia, reports having spotted an Old English sign-off at the end of a colleague's email "swa a", which apparently means "as ever".
Participants in the StrategyOne survey reported all manner of strange email closings that tumble forth from correspondents revelling in the intoxicating mania of near-instantaneous communication. Among them: "In brotherhood", "That's me yo", "Hope you live through the night", "Safety first", "Wonka wonka" and "Seacrest out".
Until email etiquette starts being taught in elementary school, perhaps we've little choice left but to hit send first and ask forgiveness later.
Cheers & Ciao, Yr Obdt Srvt.
