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Re: Netiquette questions

2001-05-29 16:52:21
Pal asked,

| Is there a reason going around for using only lower-case text in email
| messages?

It's been common practice for over a decade in my experience and likely long-
er.  The reason is laziness or a misplaced goal of cutesiness.  Certainly
solid lower case puts much less strain on readers' eyes than capslock.  When
I ran mailing lists I told those who wrote in all capitals that if they re-
ally found it too annoying to use correct capitalization, solid lower case
would be acceptable there, but of course there are venues where solid lower
case comes off as too childish or sloppy and only canonical capitalization
will do.

| When 'Replying' to an email message, an 'Re: ' is inserted at the
| beginning of the 'Subject: ' field, does 'Re: ' stand for 'Reply'
| or 'Regarding'?

Neither, but "regarding" is closer.  It's from a legalese Latin expression
_in_re_ that means "about the matter of" and has been used in business cor-
respondence to mean "about" since long before email was invented.  In a way,
use of both "Subject:" and "Re:" is redundant, and the colon, which should
introduce an appositive and not separate a preposition from its object, is
not really correct.

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