"Allow myself to introduce.....myself." -- Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery.
Whippersnappers don't seem to believe in things like spelling, punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure, and all kinds of boring stuff like that, but I think the world would be a better place if every kid's parents gave him a copy of "The Elements of Style" for his or her 10th birthday. And a copy of Mrs. Baldrige's book about manners. And then, when they graduate from college, they should get a book about executive communication and manners.
Not only would this completely eliminate the misuse of the word "myself," (i.e. "If you have any questions, please see Jen or myself."), I will never again have to open my work email to see a message from some 23-year-old with the subject line, "it's me again." I am not making this up. That was a message in my in-box last week, prompting me to cry out in outrage, "'It's me again' is not a subject line for a business email!" causing my office-mate to burst into very loud laughter and me to lay my head down and thump it several times on my desktop.
Remember, younguns, what you call style quirks, the rest of us call plain bad grammar!
5 comments:
There are a couple people I know who leave blank subject lines - BLANK! Morons. It's all I can do to not delete the offending message immediately.
Don't even start. In an industry where half the engineers have English as a third language and the other half thought the liberal arts classes were for doing math homework or catching up on sleep, use of good grammar marks you as an outcast. I've actually found an improvement in results when I intentionally use the same bad sentence structure as everyone else. Makes me sad.
My grandparents gave me The Elements of Style when I grad'yated high school but I don't remember actually, uh, reading it. Well, I had math homework.
Oooohhhh, the blank subject line. Death be upon those who do it. And brand managers who forward strings of 20 emails with the message "Please see below," and no further instructions or action items. Just "Please see below."
ESL emails are a source of endless amusement; I sometimes have exchanges with people in Geneva and Italy that would make Safire's head explode but leave me in stitches.
Lawyers write chickenshit letters. They're always too scared to write in first person. It's always "This firm" or "we" or "the undersigned, because God forbid I should actually place you on the other side of a transitive verb with me, and if I did you might hurt me or something NOOOOOOOO MOMMEEEE."
I have a copy; who doesn't? But someone at The Chronicle isn't a fan. And he ain't shy. Interested in what he has to say?
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i32/32b01501.htm
At this point in my writing life, I prefer "Eats Shoots and Leaves," but I won't ever completely chuck Strunk...
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