The Wit’s Guide to Email

Or, per one out

Jul 18, 2024

“This couldn’t have been an email.” Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid by Johannes Vermeer, c. 1670

I hope this email finds you. I hope this email finds you well. I hope this email finds you in a well. Well?

“The best letters of our time are those that can never be published.”
— Virginia Woolf

At this point in the history of human communication, email is like opera. We have better ways to do what it does. It’s highly mannered, requiring flourishes that don’t exist elsewhere in society. Very few people admit to liking it. It costs an awful lot to keep going. And yet it lurches onward, unkillable. The fat lady will never sing, though she might accidentally reply all.

“People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what’s wrong with it.”
— Noel Coward

Let me not say it’s nice to e-meet you. Is it ever nice to e-meet anyone? Perhaps, but not with the word e-meet.

“One of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer.”
— Lord Byron

Will we ever get a book of email correspondence as good as The Groucho Letters? Soon after the Library of Congress requested Groucho Marx’s letters in the 1960s, Simon & Schuster published this collection of letters to and from the mustachioed mensch, and in it are such gems as his refusal to join any club that would have him, the Goodman Ace quip that television is called “a medium because nothing’s well done,” as well as this 1955 revelation to his friend Harry Kurnitz:

“Many years ago I chased a woman for almost two years, only to discover that her tastes were exactly like mine: we both were crazy about girls.”
— Groucho Marx

If we do get a modern collection of witty emails, it will likely come out of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, the top-dollar bidder for the archives of the great and the good. Early indications suggest they’ll need more computing power to find the treasures; the limited research that’s been done on Ian McEwan’s donated emails has found it difficult to tell the inbox from the sent items, as well as, surprise surprise, plenty of spam. (Or as researcher Lise Jallant dryly put it, “I suggested the deletion of some commercial emails, since they do not present obvious scholarly interest.”)

“The email of the species is deadlier than the mail.”
— Stephen Fry

Elsewhere among the papers held by Ransom are Tom Stoppard’s emails, but as a gentleman of the old school, the playwright printed out all his electronic mail and wrote replies by hand. In 1996 a pair of self-described “over-confident A-level Theatre Studies students” wrote to ask his opinion of casting females in the lead roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Stoppard’s reply: “R&G were always intended to be played by women. It has been a continual frustration to me that theatres insist on casting men.”

“I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up.”
— Tom Lehrer

“Per my last email” is the worst, like citing yourself. It brings to mind the possibly apocryphal Icelandic proverb that every man likes the smell of his own farts. Per my last sentence, I once accidentally rendered the signoff “belated thanks” as “bleated thanks.” In a goatish way, it worked.

“I believe in opening mail once a month, whether it needs it or not.”
— Bob Considine

My son once declared that the signoff “best” was rude, because why are you bragging to your correspondent? I explained that you weren’t saying you were the best but rather that it was a substantive adjective that replaced “best wishes” or “best regards,” but you try telling that to a nine-year-old. Worst!

“This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.”
— William Faulkner

For paid subscribers, a sign of hope!

I think we can all agree these are trying times. Or maybe we can’t agree, and that’s why they’re so trying. Either way, the Riposte Card for the month of July riffs on a great quip by Sydney Smith that puts the apocalypse in perspective. This clever artwork by illustrator Nicole Iu will be snail mailed out to paying subscribers this weekend, so get on board now to receive yours!

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— Sydney Smith

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