A note upon his desk "PS Bring me home and have me"

[venta]

Note for geeks: you may be disappointed. This is not about page description languages (see the dots?)

On Wednesday, I wrote what I hope was an entertaining email to one of my colleagues apologising for the fact that, in his absence, I'd broken his mug. It was a rather handsome mug with Brunel on the side, and I inadvertently batted it across the room while sitting on said colleague's desk doing an impression of a surprised North Korean soldier (it was all hjalfi's fault).

Yesterday, I received an entertaining (and, in the circs, gracious) reply by email from said colleague. It finished:

PS I don't suppose you have a video of the incident do you ?[*]

I don't, of course.

However, it got me thinking: in the days[**] when we did arcane things like writing letters on paper with pens, a postscript was a perfectly sensible thing. It said oh, and here's something I forgot to put in the letter before I signed off. PPS was there for the really absent-minded.

But in email, there is no justification for using a PS. Text can easily be added anywhere in the mail before you send it - anything genuinely forgotten usually has to be sent in a second email. So, either some bizarre sense of honesty makes people add a PS to show that something was forgotten or, much more likely, it has become a Device.

You can stick a humorous afterthought in a PS, and it has more impact than if it had just been trailing along at the end of the letter. You can, if you're feeling particularly guilty, hide a statement you don't want to make in a PS and hope that its impact will be lessened or it won't be noticed at all. You can use it as a sort of Easter egg, an extra smile for a reader who thought they'd finished reading. Or none of the above.

So tell me, o LJ, for I am curious: do you use P.S. regularly ? If so why, and for what reason ? Do you regard it as a epistolatory appendix, doomed in these easy days of cut and paste ?

[*] Note for bateleur: it would appear tpr has the same bad habit with spacing that I do.
[**] Like yesterday, in my case.

Comments

Re: PS

[venta.livejournal.com]

And mostly I edit to correct typos, like making 'use' into 'user' above!