Greetings and Salutations: Endangered Species

Dear readers:

No, that won’t do for an email nowadays. Try again.

Hello, all:

or should my greeting be less hellish? (A generation ago, a county in Texas adopted “heaven-o” as an alternative to “hello.” No, I won’t go that far. Just this — )

Hi, all:

Maybe that will get me off on the right foot. It’s hard to be sure, because in the world of email the salutations aren’t as fixed as they were for communications on paper. Before the internet, a business letter in hard copy would begin “Dear So&So,” even if So&So were not dear to the writer, or even known. So one would write without the least touch of irony, “Dear Office of the County Clerk” or “Dear Complaint Department.”

So a good case could be made that, back in the days of paper, ”dear” overpopulated communications by letter. When it came time to establish conventions for email, it was open season on “dear,” and it was so thoroughly thinned out in favor of alternatives like the ones I have used that “dear” could now almost be considered an endangered species.

The “dear” that remain are a healthier population. Nowadays a surviving “dear” in the headline is more likely to be sincere, at least if it addresses a real person as opposed to “Dear Frustrated Customer.”

But with “dear” mostly disposed of, what is the best way to begin an email? I’m not so impressed with “hello” or “hi,” which were never used in paper communications in olden times. That’s because those are calls for attention, appropriate for telephone calls but not for written language. “Hello” calls for an immediate response, a “hello” back, before the message. That’s the way instant messaging works, but not email.

I prefer, instead, to use the recipient’s name as a vocative in the first sentence of my message, preceded by no salutation at all. So I’ll start like this:

• Aristophanes, I think you’re stretching the notion of comedy too far.

• You really are the top, Mr. Porter.

• And you, my truly dear dear readers, how do you begin your email messages? You may have better ways. Please let us know.