>> Celebdaq? Oh, puh-lease, that's so 2003. :) Absolutely. For the last 3 years, I just buy Madonna - she's easy, cheap and she gets column inches.

...just realised there's been one sitting blank for a while. Any innovative ideas?

[gil] Still doing pottering with the daq, member of Ultimates (MSN group) for investment tips and DDT also peek at http://www.redtide.co.uk/celebdaq/index.html?s=09000901
Every now again like today Mornington_Crescent appears on the front page, sadly I run more than one account. Still not made Top Trader.

An old standby from my days as a language assistant - "What will you do this weekend?" "Remember, we construct the future tense using the auxiliary 'will' - the clue's in the question!"

I'm currently waiting for a friend to make his way out of Town to the boondocks of the tube system, from where we will embark on a voyage of historical discovery. We're going up the M40 to go and look at the paintings in a stately home. I have to choose the CDs for the trip, and he's going to choose the destination. We'll probably argue a bit.

I learned why the Knights say "Ni!". Néa must know this already. "Ni" is the Swedish for "you" in the plural, and used to also be the formal singular "you", like the French "vous". However, Swedish added a strange twist to this. If someone was eligible to be addressed as "ni" then, by definition, it was inappropriate to do so. Instead, one referred to them by their title, e.g. "would the professor like another cup of tea?" As the writer concludes, "the world really is coming to a sorry state when people are going about saying "ni" to old ladies."
       I suspected the story of being a wind-up, but I happened to have a copy of "Teach Yourself Swedish" dating from 1969, and it agrees. It also said that the awkwardness of having to address people in the third person, while also avoiding the words "he" and "she" (taboo in this situation), had led to efforts to persuade the Swedish public to use "ni" more widely, with some success. However, the success must have been limited, as I understand that the formal "ni" is now all but extinct.
       It is not know if the Knights who say "Ni!" are a deliberate reference to this quirk of Swedish grammar.

This weekend, which is mostly gone now here? Watched a Hindi film, bought some plants and crushed my right index finger in a car door.

"In Soviet Union, Saturday is START of weekend."

Ha! Despite the fact that I don't follow the trends in e.g. http://www.redtide.co.uk/celebdaq/index.html?s=09000901 I have been making a good living buying Madonna, which seems to be a profitable move.

Wow! That hurts. My father-in-law shut the car door on my finger just before Beryl and I drove off on honeymoon... No remarks, please. My style was NOT cramped.

*Delurking*
[Raak] But these knights you speak of are no longer the Knights Who Say 'Ni!' and annecdotal evidence would suggest they ceased to be so some time before 1000 AD, before the age of 'Professors'. Therefore, going by the rules of good Swedish, it would be inappropriate to refer them as 'Neow-wom-peng!' or something close to that. This story would appear to be another urban legend. :)
[gil] Your 'Celebdaq' posting had me in stitches when I read it. Then I looked up 'Celebdaq' and twigged I had the wrong end of the stick. Thanks for the laugh anyway.

[Sierra Mike] I prefer to interpret the film as a metaphorically expressed history of Swedish grammar.

[Sierra Mike]re Madonna... I have to confess the wording was chosen with irony in mind.

[gil] Ah, well, it worked then.
[Raak] You are undoubtedly right. Where do the dismemberment ad absurdum and cannibalism fit in?

[Sierra] I think it would take an expert in Scandinavian historical linguistics to fathom out the entirety of the Pythons' subtle code.

[Raak] Now you come to mention it, there was that whole Scandinavian thread running through the opening credits, wasn't there? Jeepers, you may be onto somthing potentially very rewarding in the accademic sense and not to shabby in the next-year's-beach-book arena too if you can pull a "Dan Brown". The Python Codex is certain to be a blockbuster.

It's ages since we had a Film Club or a Song Book...

[pen] And Sound Charades, as well. Something should really just get rushed thru'.

[Raak] That's it, in essentials, though not quite quite. Quoting my handbook in etiquette from 1933:

"Although the use of the address ni is more common today than ten or fifteen years ago, it is not accepted in ordinary social life. [...] it is however permitted to include a ni here and there in conversation, provided that one also includes the title. Thus, it is possible to say "Oh, so the countess was in Visby last summer, how did ni find it?" or "Is the consul going to Paris, weren't ni there last spring?" But you cannot be too young if you are to use ni to older people [etc etc for 30 more pages about use of titles I kid you not]"

It does say that using "ni" to colleagues is fine, though, as well as some other equal-status situations where it was OK. There's a whole chapter about when to stop using titles -- always a mutual process, you stopped using each other's titles and said du (sing. "you") instead of ni. A lot happened in the decades following with an increase in "ni" and decrease of titles, but the big big revolution was in the late 1960s, when the head of a government office declared that he would say "du" to all his employees and expected "du" back. (Well, that's it in a nutshell anyway -- it was more complicated of course.)
Anyway, the funny thing is that after all that, today Swedish uses virtually no titles at all. We have "Mr", Mrs", "Miss" and "Dr" and various old nobility and royal titles, but apart from royalty nobody uses any titles, ever. (Very young schoolkids tend to call their teacher "miss" or "teacher", but once they hit 10 or so it's strictly first names.) So when buying, say, plane tickets from British Airways, a Swede is struck by the necessity to put a title there -- which feels very very foreign.

[Néa] Swedish schoolchildren are presumably too well brought up to say "Ni!" to a teacher. Would that our lot were as aware of the social graces.

My butcher calls me "Sir", and I love it. I'd be delighted to go back to using titles and surnames instead of all this pseudo-familiar first name tosh. If someone repeatedly uses my name, I instinctively remind myself not to buy anything, or co-operate for that matter. Still, it's better than being called "mate" by someone I'm trying to conduct some business with.

(Phil) My Indian newsagent always greets me with a smile and "Ah, Mr Hughes" when I go in each week to pay for the papers. This is almost too formal even for someone of my age but charming nevertheless. What I really don't like is name-tags where the surname is omitted. It's either false familiarity or management's way of saying you're not very important.

I'm not keen on letters coming from people with gender-neutral names (like Chris) without a title as you then never know how to write back to them.

[rab] "Dear Chris"? Isn't the point that once they've introduced themselves by a particular name it's quite acceptable to address them by it...?

My nextdoor neighbours are Chris and Sam. Any guesses?

{Projoy] Actually, I was thinking of emails rather than letters where you have mail from "Chris Jones", and at the bottom a standard sig "Chris Jones, Gender Neutrality Officer". To me, it feels utterly wrong beginning a communication with "Dear Chris" when I've never met the person in question.

Mind you, I once had a letter from Scottish Gas, signed by hand as "Scottish Gas"...

[rab] Did you reply "Dear Scottish" or "Dear Mr Gas"?

I agree with rab about feeling uncomfortable replying to mails like that. I generally duck the issue and just start them with "Hi -" and in fact, I don't often use names at all unless there's ambiguity as I've never been comfortable with using people's names for any purpose whatsoever, even if I've known them for years. Dunno why.

[rab] "Dear Sir or Madam, as the case may be:" Although in email I never use any salutation at all.

[Raak] Why not? [All others] What about you? Do you use salutations in email?

[Néa] Just the custom I'm accustomed to (and therefore the One True Way).

I use 'Good morning [name] or sometimes just 'Good Morning' (or afternoon), or sometimes 'Dear [name] in an email; if it's a round-robin (which is often is) I just start with an attention-grabbing 'Ladies and Gentlemen' which seems to go down fairly well, apart from with one individual who has been making a fool of herself recently and is not much longer for this corporate world, I feel.
[Rosie] A gay couple. With stupid parents. :oP

[Néa, from whom all knowledge springs, from whose navel a lotus springs forth and who encompasses the oceans in three strides] I avoid salutations as unnecessary ornamentation.

[Salutations] For email, even formal email, I find that "Hello," is a perfectly good opening for almost every purpose. So much so that I now find it slightly quaint to receive an email that begins "Dear..." (particularly if the person uses my surname). And it's been many a year since I've seen a "yours faithfully". If forced into a formal signoff, I tend to stick to just "Yours," for fear of writing something I don't in the slightest bit mean, such as "sincerely".

[Dear Mr B-----,] While I am familiar with the feeling whereof you speak re: addressing someone by their first name prior to a formal introduction, which no doubt is deplored in Debrett, I can't say I've experienced a great deal of discomfort in discarding the convention.

In emails, I use "yours faithfully", "your sincerely", "regards" or "kind regards" depending on the context. I also use "cheers", which I use as a multi-purpose word in spoken coversation anyway. However, at the start of an email, I tend just to use the person's name (surname if we're not acquainted, forename if we are) or "Dear Sir or Madam" if it's to "complaints@????.com" or "service@????.com" (as many of my emails are).

[Phil] Whats the difference between regards and kind regards? I've never really appreciated this subtlety.

(pen) Sorry, but it's Christopher and Samantha. 50 yrs ago it would have been Christine and Samuel.

Now I come to look at it, Christine seems such a silly name. It's like the brand name of a sort of mini-Messiah individually wrapped for your comfort and convenience.

"Vicar, do you sell small packs of Christines for the weekend?"

[Projoy] Most names start to look pretty silly if you look at them too closely, like most words.

[Néa] I tend to use a first name and a colon. It's my style. For example:

Dear Samantha:

Isn't it about time you got off Humphrey's hand? I should think it was quite uncomfortable.

All the best,

Nights.

I think of an email as being a less formal letter - with an opening, closing and all the rest. Most of my peers think I'm bizarre for this.

hi nites i reckn your a yong fogy rosie

In email I don't use valedictions either, just my name at the end or a .sig. Written letters go "Dear Sir/Yours faithfully" or "Dear [name]/Yours".

Hmm, well showing my old-foginess I start with a "signature" saying who I am, website details etc. (Though this is automatically included) Then I use Dear (name) <comma> Dear Humphrey, Then the text - all properly written out and hopefully correctly spelt and punctuated. And I tail it with Regards, Blob (or whatever soubriquet that person knows me by) ........ What's more, I write SMS texts in much the same way !!!

(Nights) Actually most of my emails are no different from letters except in the greeting if I'm familiar with the person. This means capitals, punctuation and paragraphs. Well, why not? At my age you simply don't give a toss if people think you're bizarre. It's great.

The thing is, I tend to see emails as more closely related to memos than letters. When I receive an email written like a formal letter, it comes across, frankly, as somewhat illiterate.

[darren] How would you receive a letter through your letterbox? Would you feel impatience that they didn't email you about it?

[Projoy] It's a gut feeling thing. Although, if I sit and think about it, my regards tend to be much kinder if I'm selling than buying.

[pen] I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at there.

[pen] Dunno about Darren, but I would feel exactly that (and frequently do). We've too few trees as it is, without wasting them on pointless letters, cards etc.

(Projoy) You really can't be allowed to get away with that. The proportion of paper in actual letters compared with the total amount of paper (newspapers, junk mail etc) that comes through my letterbox is very small. In any case, we're not short of trees; there are many more than there were 40-50 years ago, everywhere. To be honest, I'm not that keen on trees, they spoil the view and at one time threatened to undermine my house. Rather overrated, I feel.

[Rosie] Who says my annoyance is confined to only legitimate letters? As to "more trees", I don't know if that's true, although I guess you're more likely to know than I am, But don't we need even more trees at the moment to do Carbon Dioxide conversion? This is the general impression I have gained.

I suspect Rosie is right that there are more trees now than in the 50's. I'm pretty sure, however, that there were many more in the 30's and more still before WW1. Also, the tree-planting boom of the 50's 60's & 70's was mostly conifer plantations. Planting more trees as mixed woodland must be a good thing both aesthetically and as carbon sinks.

IIRC, commercial forestry supplies most of the pulp for paper - and that's a planting-and-harvesting operation of fast-growing monoculture conifers; it doesn't use wood from mixed and deciduous woodland.

I'm still not sure what forest conservation and my opinion of email writing style have to do with each other.

Which would explain the demise of resin/wood particle composite board and the resurgence of quality natural wood at the woodyards. Oh, hang on......

That's a matter of furniturenfashion and the health hazards of the resin fumes, innit?

[Rosie] Well I look forward to being 23 then. And I write text messages just the same way - the joy of predictive text. And a new phone!

In other news, I handed in my dissertation today!

[nights] Congratulations! Well done! I hate you. No, really, well done.

(Projoy) It's true that trees fix carbon rather than letting it float free as CO₂ but the number needed to make any difference is impractically large particularly considering the rate the Amazon jungle and other areas are being chopped down. Trees are nice but have become sacred, which is just silly. They undermine buildings, obscure the sky and the view, drop leaves on the railway line and are even allowed to obscure signals. The biodiversity of tree-free railway cuttings was incredible. Down with trees! BTW I don't quite understand your aversion to printed paper. I get cards all the time from my nieces in addition to all the emails, which is nice, and far better than when they were young teenagers and sent me electronic Christmas cards. Sod that.

[Rosie] Well, I suppose it's a personal preference, but I just find dealing with paper irritating these days. It becomes clutter very quickly. You can't miniaturise it and file it conveniently in a sensible folder system on a HDD. Cards and the like seldom express sentiments profound enough to be worth keeping, and for the most part are ritualistic and purposeless. Almost anything that could be said in a conventional letter could be said in an email, which is far more keepable these days.

[PJ, Rosie] Being a keen calligrapher - I mostly design and write greetings cards to close friends and family. They seem to appreciate the personal, snail-mail touch because it's evidence that one has made the effort. Far more 'keepable' I'd say.

I loathe "greetings cards", and I've just deleted my justification of that statement because I don't want to feel yet again that I'm the only one singing in tune :-)

[Phil] I'm only mentioning how much I despise commercial greetings cards so you know you're not alone. Under normal circumstances I wouldn't even have botherd to mention it. Profit margins of 60%+?? The sleazy slimeballs.

Me2, as mentioned (and justified) above.