I am regularly fascinated by the change that people’s language appears to undergo when it comes to writing letters or e-mails. These people regularly speak effortless, fluent English as a matter of course. It is the language they read in, the language in which they were educated and the language with which they are most comfortable. But when it comes to written correspondence, they lapse into an alien language; one that is stilted, awkward and completely alien to their normal way of communicating.
My dad and I rarely e-mail each other unless for something specific. Each time I am startled anew by the extent to which his e-mails sound like old-fashioned letters to the editor in a conservative newspaper. Phrases like “do this immediately, brat” and “where are the pictures you were supposed to send me?” are replaced with a barrage of “kindly advise”s and “please do the needful”s. It is alarming.
I think one big reason for this stilted language is that written correspondence hasn’t evolved quickly enough to keep up with culture. I’ve complained in the past in this column about the lack of an appropriate, gender neutral and formal greeting that one might use in e-mails. We don’t know how to sound respectful but not cringing or polite without an excess of formality. The tone is always wrong.
And then there are the Very Very Indian phrases that have crept into our language and made it even more awkward than it really is. The way the
entire country seems to have adopted the word “revert” for its correspondence, and somehow unanimously decided that it should mean something different than it does. “Kindly revert back to me” is not a request for a timely reply. Instead it implies that the recipient of the correspondence should turn back into the sender — as if the sender were the homo erectus to the recipient’s homo sapiens. It is an alarming thought.
Then there’s the much overused “do the needful” which has at least (unlike “revert”) the advantage of being correct usage. It is extremely archaic, though, and sounds more like a parody of Indian English than any sort of natural expression. In addition (and this may be a problem that is specific to myself and the friend who pointed it out to me*) it is easy to be distracted by the knowledge that it would make a fantastic euphemism. One can easily imagine it popping up in all sorts of pornographic scenarios.
“Oh, Amit,” she moaned, desperately clawing at his hard, masculine back, “kindly do the needful”. You see?
Perhaps it’s just that we still think of written and spoken English as different sorts of beast. People still choose to litter their writing with set phrases and clichés and to admire any writing that feels complicated, no matter how many words are misused, or how many times such language trips over its own feet. And until that changes, inter-office e-mails and the letters pages of newspapers are likely to continue to be hilarious.
(*Thanks, Ishitah)
— bluelullaby@gmail.com
