Is “dear” more than the conventional salutation with which written communications traditionally begin? Is it also a term of endearment suggesting an intolerable abbreviation of social distance?
That is the question at the heart of the Twitter splutter between federal minister Smriti Irani and Bihar minister Ashok Choudhary, who had bracketed her name in a tweet between “dear” and the equally traditional “ji.” The fireworks call attention to much that we write automatically in letters, out of habit.
Just days ago, the owner of a busted refrigerator tweeted an SOS to Irani’s colleague Sushma Swaraj when the frigid company presumably ignored his petition. Would he have got more satisfaction if his communications with its officials were not prefaced by the traditional “dear,” but more energetic four-letter words of ancient provenance?
Perhaps a statistician working for the public interest will stop busting his or her gusset over the protean GDP figures and engage with the interesting probabilities of four-letter communications. We do not mean the sort of words that Pahlaj Nihalani alertly deflects from the screen. “Love,” which closes many written communications, is also a four-letter word.
Actually, formal structure has lost all meaning in written communications. SMS made a virtue of brevity and speed and produced a weird shorthand pidgin which we have become inured to, and which has spilled over into all other messaging systems, and Twitter.
Even email, which was held to be as formal as a paper letter because it is asynchronous, caught the SMS bug and it is now acceptable to write mails with no salutation or professions of respect or love. People even write a whole mail in the subject line, leaving the body blank.
What chance of formality, then, in a tweet to a minister, when just the salutation “hon’ble” is 5 percent of the permitted length?
(The Indian Express editorial on June 16, 2016)