What words do you put at the end of an email? Or at the end of a letter? (Does anyone still write letters?) In her column in the Sunday Telegraph, Francis Whiting raised this issue because she had received a letter (Ah! Some people still write letters!) which had the word ‘Delightfully’ at the end just before the signature. Francis was so tickled by this she said she will adopt it as a sign-off herself. I’m less impressed. What does it mean? That I (the writer) am a delightful person and what I have just written is delightful? A bit presumptuous, surely? As anyone who has received an email from me knows, I very often sign-off with ‘cheers’ – a rather jolly, all-purpose ending. Francis said this has also been her go-to ending up until now, but in the future she’ll send people the message that she has written ‘delightfully’ as the sign-off. Hhmm. Not sure about that. How about you? How do you end emails (or letters)? Do you write ‘Yours sincerely’ (or perhaps the one-word abbreviation ‘Sincerely’)? But if, in my haste, I leave this off a short note, does that mean I’ve suddenly become insincere? Then there’s ‘Yours faithfully’ (again with a one-word version ‘Faithfully’). But who or what am I claiming to be faithful to? My political party? My favourite restaurant? My Christian beliefs? My football team? Francis Whiting goes on to claim there are other options, such as: ‘Looking forward to hearing from you’ (Surely not! It only encourages them!); ‘Best wishes’ or ‘Warm wishes’ (but do you really care what I am wishing for you? Or what temperature my wishes are?); ‘Cordially’ (better, I suppose, than ‘Bitterly’); or ‘Take care’ (if I hadn’t written that would you have carelessly risked life and limb?) So, what last words do you use?

Speccie reader Sue asks me to explain the term ‘intergenerational equity’. It seems to date back to 1964, when it was coined by sociologists (them again!). ‘Intergenerational equity’ is a phrase that comes under the wider ambit of DEI – Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The aim of DEI is to identify a group as being ‘disadvantaged’ and then give that group special rights under the law to overcome their perceived problems. It’s based on the Marxist analysis of society into just two groups: (1) the oppressors, and (2) the oppressed. ‘Intergenerational equity’ identifies people based on age – concluding that the younger generation is oppressed, and their oppressors are folk older than them. The standard Marxist response is to legally disadvantage the oppressors (older people) in order to relieve the disadvantage of the oppressed (younger people). If this strikes you as a load of old rope, that’s because that’s exactly what it is.

Why do people try to turn the second person pronoun ‘you’ into a plural by saying ‘yous’? The short answer is – because they don’t know any better. But there is a longer, historical and (I think) quite interesting answer. Until the 1600s the second person pronoun had various forms – ‘thou’ in the singular and ‘ye’ for the plural. But in the course of that century – for reasons that are not entirely clear – all of the different, older, versions of the second person pronoun (‘thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thy’, ‘thine’ and the rest) just went away. People stopped using them. And what people use is what the English language is. All that was left was ‘ye’.

Then it appears that over the 1700s the vowel sound changed and ‘ye’ became ‘you’. That means that our familiar word ‘you’ is grammatically plural. But it has clearly ended up being used for both the plural and the singular.

That created a problem for people who didn’t understand. Not having sat through the history lesson I’ve just given you they thought ‘you’ was singular and it was someone’s job to create a plural form – so they did the usual thing when creating a plural in English, they added an ‘s’ and they got the word ‘yous’. The Oxford says that form is used in Scotland, parts of the United States and Australia. It seems to have been coined about 1835 – or, at least, that’s the first time anyone has found it appearing in print. And it remains relatively rare – ‘yous’ occurs about 0.05 times per million words in modern written English. It is what we politely call ‘non-standard’. So if you don’t want to sound like a dope, don’t use it.