Just now, I wrote an email and I couldn’t for the life of me think how to sign it off. ‘Kind regards’, the default setting for most messages, felt a bit too formal, given I am on friendly terms with the recipient; he’s older than me and a priest. ‘Yours ever’ seems forward. ‘Best wishes’ is fine for strangers but may be stilted for someone you know quite well. ‘M’, my most frequent sign-off, would look downright rude. An ‘X’ was out of the question. So plain ‘Melanie’ it was.
But I was left wondering which of the range of options I should have gone for, each suggestive of a slight difference on the register from intimacy to formality. Get it wrong in one direction and you look standoffish; get it wrong in the other and you look like you’re taking liberties.
Emails and texts are informal in nature and that has made written communications more fraught.
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