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I ended the mail with a "Cordialmente" ( ~ Cordially) as it was informal, and it translated this single word to "Veuillez agréer, Madame, Monsieur, l'expression de mes sentiments les plus distingués", which is about the most formal formula possible.
I've long done away with email signatures. I have no signature at all. (Metadata is plenty to let people know my full name, and they can just Google me, or use Superhuman / Rapportive to get info on me in context.)
These days, most of my emails are signed with "-Kenneth" only. No signoff, no signature. The rest don't have a signature at all and just contain a one line response.
For greetings, a simple "Hi" or "Hey" with the recipient(s)' first name does the trick.
Receiving emails with giant email signatures drives me nuts. I don't care to have your logo, 10 contact infos and a giant email disclaimer wasting a full page length of my screen. The worst are the notes "please consider the environment before printing this email." These make me want to roll my eyes so hard.
Yesterday I was writing an email in Spanish and I put it into DeepL machine learning translation to translate it back to French for me to check if what I wrote made enough sense to be parsed. I ended the mail with a "Cordialmente" ( ~ Cordially) as it was informal, and it translated this single word to "Veuillez agréer, Madame, Monsieur, l'expression de mes sentiments les plus distingués", which is about the most for…
Most I've seen are "Bien à vous" or "Bonne journée".
Actually... what are the most common endings in French emails? Thinking that a website that had all of those sorted out, categorised by language and degree of formality, would be really useful. Sometimes people just want the equivalent of "Cheers" in e.g. Spanish?
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I'm still pretty formal with new clients. It takes me years to leave out a valediction with some. But on the other hand, my favorite valediction is usually "Cheers," since it seems the most casual and least demanding. Still, I always worry this gives away the fact that I'm an alcoholic. My runner up is "Yours," which I see didn't make the list.
Maybe it's an effective filter. I use cheers too. If someone is too formal to enjoy cheers, then I probably don't want them as a client. I put out casual, easy-going and hard working. Cheers aligns. Candidly, I think "Yours" is just weird. Maybe even kind of creepy? Just roll with cheers and forget about it!
This is an excellent example of why inferring causation from an observed correlation requires great care. Note that the study did not randomly assign valedictions to emails and observe the causal impact on response rate. Rather, they observed a correlation between the sign-off chosen and the response rate. "Thanks" garners many responses because people use it in emails that make reasonable requests with a good chance…
The Italian word "ciao" [0] comes from the word "slave", meaning exactly that - "I am your humble servant". Became popular in Venice and then spread elsewhere. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciao
BTW, interesting fact: "The Venetian word for "slave", s-ciào [ˈstʃao] or s-ciàvo, derives from Medieval Latin sclavus, a loanword from Medieval Greek Σκλάβος, related to the ethnic "Slavic", since most of the slaves came from the Balkans."
I'll be extremely sad if one day we'd have to lose the most common salutation because somebody deemed it offensive.
That the "community" is against this (which is a contentious claim but certainly a vocal subset are against it) may be an indicator as to why I try not to spend any time on it any more.
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On moving to the UK and for the first time using English "full time" it took me longer than it should have to get used to "how are you?" as merely a "friendly noise". At first I found it incredibly rude how people would ask me a question and then keep walking while I stopped to start answering their question.
Well, because it's not a question.
The point was that it's not at all obvious that it's not a question to someone not used to it being used as a greeting, given that it's worded as a question, and the intonation is given as a question, and given that many places in the world you wouldn't say the equivalent unless you're actually asking a question.
English feels to me to be pretty extreme relative to other languages with respect to the sheer number of terms that have been reduced to "friendly noises" and stripped of all meaning, to the point that it leads to the number of comments in this thread discussing the nuances of terms the sender most of the time has put no thought into.
I still tend to feel someone who throws out a "friendly noise" like this are usually being rude by using a question as a greeting, because whether you like it or not, it's implicitly acknowledging you don't really care, and so I avoid using it.
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The Italian word "ciao" [0] comes from the word "slave", meaning exactly that - "I am your humble servant". Became popular in Venice and then spread elsewhere. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciao
I'm born and raised in Italy and TIL. Makes sense, ciao -> sciao -> schiavo (slave). BTW, interesting fact: "The Venetian word for "slave", s-ciào [ˈstʃao] or s-ciàvo, derives from Medieval Latin sclavus, a loanword from Medieval Greek Σκλάβος, related to the ethnic "Slavic", since most of the slaves came from the Balkans." I'll be extremely sad if one day we'd have to lose the most common salutation because somebody…
Thanks! (in keeping with the topic at hand.)
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I'm still pretty formal with new clients. It takes me years to leave out a valediction with some. But on the other hand, my favorite valediction is usually "Cheers," since it seems the most casual and least demanding. Still, I always worry this gives away the fact that I'm an alcoholic. My runner up is "Yours," which I see didn't make the list.
I still feel very much on the hook when a customer raises a support request. That means we have a bug. If we talk often, that means they are a very good customer but we have a lot of bugs… Therefore I stick to “Best regards” mechanically. Note that I’m French, not native in English, so I’m not mastering colloquialities. Would it be appropriate to be more relaxed?
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> I just don't think there's all that much difference in meaning between these common formulaic responses. My father agrees, and for a time his standard greeting to colleagues were these words: "Friendly Noise" I've tried it a few times. I get strange looks at first, but people adopt.
On moving to the UK and for the first time using English "full time" it took me longer than it should have to get used to "how are you?" as merely a "friendly noise". At first I found it incredibly rude how people would ask me a question and then keep walking while I stopped to start answering their question.