Is It Time to Drop the ‘Dear’?
By: Clare C.H.
Tags: Technology, Words, History, Work, Language

Is It Time to Drop the ‘Dear’?

How ‘dear’ has survived into the digital age, despite the mixed messages it sends

Don’t you find it odd how every e-mail you get from your bank asking you to review the terms of service or a delivery company informing you your parcel has gotten wedged between a rock and a hard place begins with the word dear? Dear, a word normally so fraught with emotion that in spoken language we wouldn’t use it to address anyone who isn’t our significant other, if at all, and rarely put it in front of any noun that isn’t life, God, or Watson (the holy trifecta)? What bizarre twist of fate made it acceptable for administrative clerks and marketers — or the lines of code reaching out to us on their behalf — to feign such affection for the faceless thousands on their mailing lists?

There’s no question that many of the strategies we use to be polite involve saying things we don’t mean, but with so many other formal figures of speech fading along with our memories of dial-up, it’s a wonder that the shift from snail mail to e-mail wasn’t taken as an opportunity to do away with this awkward and archaic salutation. A 1985 National Science Foundation report on the etiquette of composing “electronic mail” makes no mention of the word dear, instead suggesting, by way of example, that the model e-mail opens without any greeting at all. The writers aren’t pushing for a completely bloodless approach to online communication, however: they recommend using the word flame as an apologetic marker of an emotional outburst, as well as smiley faces to ensure that jokes and other pleasantries don’t get scrambled in the deadpan of the written word.

In the 1980s, e-mail was a facility available to only the lucky few. Around the turn of the millennium, as a mastery of basic web tools became essential for the average jobseeker, numerous handbooks on the dos and don’ts of Internet use in the professional world began filling bookshelves, and many of these lay down the law in vastly different terms. Email: The Manual, published in 2006, recommends that if you’re sending an e-mail to “anyone who in an earlier day and age would have received a business letter, make sure it’s addressed ‘Dear Mr. Smith’ or ‘Dear Ms. Jones.’” It’s a fair comparison, but then again, there are other epistolary formalities that didn’t survive the Great AOL Shift, namely the inclusion of the current date, which was made redundant by the timestamp automatically generated by your service provider. From a purely utilitarian standpoint, salutations have been made redundant by the format of e-mails, too — the “To:” line makes it clear from the outset who the message is intended for.

If you hate using ‘dear’ in e-mails, you might have Queen Margaret (1430–82) to blame (Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

But the salutation isn’t just for making sure that juicy gossip doesn’t get spilled to the wrong person. Dear has been a stylistic feature of letter-writing since the 15th century: The Oxford English Dictionary attributes its first usage to Queen Margaret, wife of Henry VI, who appears to have been riffing on a pre-existing convention of opening letters with expressions of affection or flattery. Similar terms of address included “Trusty and well beloved”, “My very good Lord”, and “Right reverent and worshipful brother”. It seems that for a time, the literal meaning of dear — precious, loved — loomed large in the user’s mind, as this opening was mainly used between family members, close friends, and lovers. It wasn’t until the 17th century that the word became appropriate in more formal registers and constructions like “Dear Sir” began to emerge. Still, right into the late 19th century, dear was still considered too intimate for use with strangers. An 1893 guide to writing business letters states that while “Dear Sir” is the most common salutation, a simple “Sir” was more appropriate “when writing to a new correspondent, or one with whom you have very little personal acquaintance”.

Today, the etiquette surrounding dear has become even looser. You’ll find it at the start of mass e-mails from HR departments, boilerplate responses from customer service reps, messages of congratulations from info@paypall.win and Scrooge McDuck’s widow, and so on. We all know it’s weird, but we seem to be short on alternatives. Casual greetings like Hi and Hey there are acceptable in a growing number of contexts (one 2015 study of nearly 400 British workplace e-mails found that well over half began with Hi + name), but don’t serve us well when beginning, for example, job applications or letters of complaint. The advice from the National Science Foundation report — to cut out the salutation altogether — may be more expedient, but can be jarring in its abruptness. You might have similar qualms with the idea of simply opening a formal e-mail with the recipient’s title and surname, yet this is how they do it in French, usually reserving “cher/chère” for only the truly cher-ished. There are other ideas we could poach from foreign languages; the standard Chinese salutation in formal letters is “尊敬的”, or respectable, while in Swedish and Dutch it’s customary to begin a letter with an adjective that translates more or less as best (such that a letter to future-you might open with “Best self”).

But what about a simple hello? It may not have been an option for 15th-century English monarchs — for many reasons, but most of all because the word hadn’t been coined yet — but for those of us who torture ourselves trying to strike a balance between spontaneity and courteousness in our written correspondences, hello seems like just the ticket: it’s embedded in our vernacular but doesn’t have the same flippant ring that its shorter counterparts do. Current trends signal that dear is going the way of airmail itself, but the day when e-mails from insurance providers begin with Hello may still be quite a ways away. Some conventions are hard to shake, especially, it seems, those related to the art of the epistle — it took until October of this year for the Law Society of Ireland to stop using “Dear Sirs” as its standard greeting in formal letters.