Per My Last Email

There are four words in the English language more violent than any oath, and a gentleman may deploy them in full daylight, in writing, with his name attached, and be thought the very soul of courtesy. The words are these: per my last email. I have used them. I am not proud. I am, if anything, exhilarated, which is worse.

To write "per my last email" is to commit, in ink, an act one would never dare in speech. In person it would require me to produce a previous conversation, unroll it like a scroll, and point, silently, at the sentence the other party has chosen to forget. No one does this at dinner. And yet by email we do it hourly, and we do it smiling, because the phrase is armoured in politeness the way a fist is armoured in a velvet glove that happens to contain a second, smaller fist.

I have studied its variants, as I study all instruments of quiet war. "As previously mentioned" is the same blow, delivered backhand. "Just circling back" is a phrase pretending to be a friendly bird when it is, in fact, a vulture, and both parties know which. "Gentle reminder" is the most violent of all, for there is nothing gentle in it and no reminder either. It is a threat wearing a cardigan.

(My apostrophe wishes it noted that I once sent a "gentle reminder" to a man who owed me nothing, concerning a matter that did not exist, purely to feel the power. He replied "per my last email," though there had been no last email. We now regard each other, across the town, with the wary respect of duellists who have both, technically, missed.)

I had meant this to be a denunciation. I find, at the crucial moment, that I cannot. The phrase is not a symptom of our coldness; it is the last refuge of our patience. Behind every "per my last email" is a human being who said a thing kindly, once, and is now saying it again, less kindly, because kindness did not work, and who has chosen, rather than scream, to attach a paper trail. That is not cruelty. That is restraint with a memory. I salute it. I withdraw the word "violent" and replace it with "load-bearing."

I would write more, but I find I owe three replies from March, two to a man I have wronged, and one to myself, reminding me, gently, that I have changed my position on all of this and shall need to be told.

Firmly, and until further notice,

Mr Fickle