Mind Moves: E-mail is a long way from snail mail. Far removed from the structure of the letter, written in one's "best hand", each sentence measured, each paragraph providing additional considered information to inform, amuse, request, convey or simply keep in touch.
Once there was an art to letter writing: a different art from that of e-mail. Letters had formalities, niceties, required modes of address to recipients, structures, special salutations and conclusions, depending on your relationship with the recipient. Unlike e-mail, the written letter did not end abruptly: no CU2moro at the end of it with perhaps a smiley face or devilish grin thrown in for good measure.
Each communication was signed according to custom - yours faithfully, sincerely, affectionately, respectfully. Affability and humility vied in the signatories concluding cordialities. Letter-writers were populated with loving sons, devoted daughters, affectionate nieces and, indeed, obedient servants which concluders have been replaced in texts today by such alphabetic brevity as BCNU (be seeing you), TTFN (ta ta for now) or TTYL (talk to you later), without an obedient servant in sight.
Letter writing was a formal business. Etiquette demanded ink, fine bonded stationery, heavier for formal communication, lighter or tissue-thin for foreign missives which could take days or weeks to arrive depending on their destination.
Good taste dictated discretely coloured paper - white, grey, granite and blue - being acceptable with matching envelopes shaped according to the type of correspondence involved. Lined paper was to be avoided at all costs while pages from a copybook were the ultimate act of disregard, even for the most casual of communications.
But most important was the good hand, the stamp of education, testimony to one's neatness, order, exactitude and control of pen and person. Script was to be clear, uniformed, disciplined and legible, descendant from the calligraphic "rustic capitals" and "square capitals" and the "Carolingian minuscule" - the derivatives of which generations of schoolchildren practised letter by letter in lined writing copies in order to perfect their penmanship so that it did not tail off across the page into minuscule diagonal illegibility.
The address on envelopes was not written in haste but commenced just a tad below the mid-point of the envelope, preferably to contain paper folded evenly once within the envelope so that upon extraction the letter opened right-side up ready to be read. As for the addressees, what a wonderful term was Messers: once the mode of address for brothers or business partners, it is now more likely to be a description of disruptive schoolboys.
Then there were The Misses, Miss, Master and Esquire. There was, of course, Mr and Mrs followed by the Christian and surname of the husband. Even Mrs when she was addressed alone, was followed by her husband's names while whole hierarchies of other titles ranked, filed and compartmentalised people in what now seems to be the most odd and unequal of ways.
But have all the changes in communication changed our actual communication? Have changes in the mode and medium of communication altered the psychology of how we relate to each other? Or does new technology simply provide more immediate ways of saying the same kind of things we have always said? Does it matter if the question is an abbreviated, RUOK as opposed to "my dearest daughter, I hope that this letter finds you happy and in good health"? Was the expression of emotions in past missives so formatted that it had a perfunctory solicitude? Or did we say more, care more, communicate more and consider more, before instant text and e-mail, which leaves mere seconds between our thoughts and communication of them.
We live our lives at the time that we live them and we express our emotions through the media available to us at that time. There is no less heartbreak after a "Dear John" letter than after a text that ends a relationship in abbreviated alphabetic form. Life, love and loss hit us with the same magnitude, whether we express them in flowery phrases or on mobile phones. The expression of anger may have been delayed and allowed to abate by the process of writing, stamping and posting that the immediacy of e-mail does not restrain, but there is equal instant communication of care, regret and concern bringing us close to each other in a different way.
Children the other side of the world can remain in reassuring chatty dialogue with home. Parties are spontaneous. Good news is instant and sad news gets to those who need to know at once. We are with each other, even as we are apart, a fingered communique away. No more is one stranded by a breakdown, lost looking for an address, late in sending birthday greetings and congratulations or prevented from telling someone that they care.
But what of posterity? Can it take care of itself? Or do we delete all records of our lives so that in the future there will be no ribbon-tied letters to witness relationships? Will we digitally record all that we wish to keep?
With these questions I sign off. I have the honour to remain, dear reader, your humble and obedient servant. C U L8R
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview.