Page:When You Write a Letter (1922).pdf/67

 in these days as to sign ourselves "Respectfully yours," to any one.

Which leads me to say that a considerable number of people who have given indications in other directions at least of being intelligent sign their letters "Very respectively yours." How one could be "respectively" anyone's unless he were a firm or a board or a dual personality of some sort is too much for me to understand. It is not surprising, however, that high school boys and country storekeepers make the mistake when one runs onto it sometimes in the letters of college graduates.

The conventional beginnings and endings of letters, like all idioms, should seldom if ever be taken literally. When we say "How do you do?" to a friend as we pass him on the street we have no thought that he will halt and give us a detailed account of his mental and physical processes. It is in most cases purely a conventional form of recognition and greeting requiring no specific reply. So, too, when we begin a business letter with "Dear Sir" or a social one with "My dear Miss Jarvis," the recipients are not justi-