I don’t remember how I signed off emails at my first job.
I remember for my second job, though, because I aped my British colleagues and went with “Cheers.”
Cheers struck me as an inordinately delightful sign-off for business emails, but I loved it.
At my next job, though—having no British colleagues—my Cheers felt a little affected. And, sure enough, someone called me on it. So I dropped the “Cheers” and resorted to “Best.”
Years later, I was reading a New Yorker article by Nathan Heller about the linguistics of the Enron “corpus”—the body of emails and corporate messaging made public after the company’s explosion—and came across this:
When the Enron corpus first became available, some people described its catalogue of tics and corporatese as “cliché”—less embarrassing to Enron, possibly, than to the species. (Who among us has not stood atop millennia of human language and, after a moment of reflection, signed an e-mail “Best”?)
Uh.
At least I’m not alone?
Heller is right, though—there’s something embarrassing about our woefully bland default sign-offs—”Best,” “Thanks,” “Kind Regards.”
Sometimes, I see (or hear about) a sign-off that jars me from my expectations that my first reaction is confusino, even irritation.
How dare they break the norm!
Or,
How dare they stand atop millennia of human language and actually use it!
My wife briefly worked with a man who signed off emails with the mysterious “YB.”
“YB?” she asked him one day.
“Ya boy!” he said, with no evidence or shame, only enthusiasm.
“Ya boy?”
“Yep! Ya boy.”
I thought this was bananas. How could he? But the more I thought about “Ya boy,” the more I respected it. There’s personality there. There’s a person who didn’t just resort to the default.
So, while I’ll avoid “YB,” I’m thinking that a “Cheers” here and there wouldn’t be so bad.
Taylor Coe 