CROSSED connections

COLIN WRESTLES WITH THE FINER POINTS OF EMAIL ETIQUETTE

Do you have trouble ending your emails? And texts too, for that matter. You know, where you’ve said whatever it was you wanted to say to whoever it was you wanted to say it to and you have to bid them farewell, and put your name at the bottom.

And perhaps an “x”. Or perhaps not. It’s one of the mysteries of life in the modern world. Just the other day, I signed off to someone with a “fondest”, only to get a reply signed off “kindest”, which seemed a bit of a step down, a bit cooler, as if I’d gone too far with the “fondest”, which maybe I had. So when

I sent her my next email, I ended with a “best”.

And then there are those people who do end with the “x” or even an “xx” – sometimes, when it hardly seems appropriate. But at the same time, it’s rough when you send out an “x” and don’t get one back, though getting an “xx” back is too much maybe. Things could spiral out of control from there.

I don’t really know, to be honest. It’s one of the terrors of the new technology in a world where the mail doesn’t arrive in that box with the number on it out by the footpath where it used to. Those things were called letters and people sent them more occasionally then than they send emails and texts now, and they put more thought into what they said and how they signed off.

But that’s all nearly gone now, along with half of the post offices. Even if I had the sudden urge to send someone a letter, I’m not sure I’d be able to find a stamp and a post box to put it into.

They took away the last post box in our suburb some time back.

Some people never quite adjusted to the new ways of communicating. My mother, for instance, has long had a troubled relationship with computers, which I think she regards as the devil’s work or something similar. She used to occasionally still send off an old-fashioned hand-written letter, full of character and news.

But even that wasn’t working so well because, as she got older, her handwriting, which was on the tiny side to start with, got smaller and tighter till it took a translator of hieroglyphs to make words of it. And she’s given up on the letters now.

There is still the occasional email, signed “with love”, but they’re only occasional. She tells me they disappear on her sometimes, lost somewhere between all the time writing and the split-second sending.

But the world, as Mum often notes, is going to hell in a hand basket, though she doesn’t use those words. And sometimes I think she might be right. Like just the other day when I read of the woman in Britain who’d asked for copies of Sleeping Beauty to be removed from schools because of the big scene where the prince wakes Beauty with a kiss without asking first.

It promotes inappropriate sexual behaviour, the worried mother said. I’m not so sure.

The next step could be the compulsory removal of all witches from fairy tales. Not to mention wicked stepmothers.