I recently had the following exchanges with technical staff at Stanford. The first relevant message went as follows (I suppress irrelevant details):
From: A...
Date: April 27, 2005...
To: zwicky@Turing.Stanford.EDU (Arnold Zwicky)
Subject: Re:...
In soc.motss, you wrote...
I forwarded a copy of A's message to B, who replied, in part:
I can't tell from below who the "you" is who wrote something in soc.motss, but perhaps it's *you*.
B can't tell who the "you" is? What's going on here?
My hypothesis is that B is treating e-mail as an instance of a special register of English, Replyese, while A and I are reading it as an exchange in everyday English, supplemented by a variety of extra information (like times in GMT). In particular, A and I think that since A was writing to me -- a fact made clear by the "From:" and "To:" headers -- the pronoun "you" refers to me, just as it would in a note to me or a phone call to me. B, on the other hand, expects (I surmise) that persons will be identified by their full names (and e-addresses) in the body of the message; the headers are irrelevant. B was expecting A to have written something like:
In soc.motss, Arnold M. Zwicky (zwicky@Turing.Stanford.EDU) wrote...
Or perhaps:
In soc.motss, Zwicky, Arnold M. (zwicky@Turing.Stanford.EDU) wrote...
Or:
In soc.motss, Woolly Mammoth (zwicky@Turing.Stanford.EDU) wrote...
Or simply:
In soc.motss, (zwicky@Turing.Stanford.EDU) wrote...
In everyday English, such a use of proper names, nicknames/pseudonyms, or addresses would be just bizarre. If Dan Jurafsky, say, greeted me in the halls of Language Log Plaza by saying "In soc.motss, Arnold M. Zwicky (zwicky@Turing.Stanford.EDU) wrote..." or any of the other variants above, I would be seriously concerned about his mental state.
I suppose A and I, clinging in our quaint way to the conventions of two-person interchanges, even in e-mail, are hopelessly Out of It. Oh, I mean that I suppose A (supply.e-address.here) and Arnold M. Zwicky (Turing.Stanford.EDU) are hopelessly Out of It.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at April 28, 2005 02:31 PM