“Lucy’s message from China”

The American University in Cairo has a pretty draconian spam filter on its email server. It’s harsh enough that I’ve missed at least one golden opportunity due to an important message being devoured at the wrong moment; now I’m more careful to check the spam box closely from time to time.

But in recent months, Chinese chemical merchants have somehow figured out a way to get through our filter. Each day, I receive anywhere from 2 to 7 of their messages.

I won’t repeat my earlier complaints that China ought to hire some culturally savvy young people to make their spam more plausible. My thinking was that China ought to do better, as an emerging global colossus. We’ll all be working for the Chinese in 20 years (I fully expect to spend my final years in China; they’ll be buying up Western academics just as the Western university financial bubble bursts).

Instead, today I find myself delighted by these chemical messages, and I may even start saving them to chart variations rather than deleting them. They have much to tell us about the unstated rules of English usage.

Consider the first part of today’s message:

“subject: Lucy’s message from China

Dear Sirs,

Have a nice day!

We can offer you chemical products. Let me introduce our company to you.”

What’s interesting here is that there is not even one grammatical mistake, and yet the English is completely bizarre. If you were teaching an English class and a student gave you this as a writing assignment, you’d have to think for a few minutes about how to correct them. (If it were a beginner’s class, you’d probably just let it slide, being happy that they hadn’t made any outright mistakes.)

What are the problems with the message? I can think of the following…

1. “Lucy.” We know the message is coming from China, and we know that most women in China do not have names such as Lucy, Lisa, Ella, and Emily. And yet, those are the sorts of names that are always used in these messages. It’s a delightfully naive attempt to seem familiar and unthreatening to the Anglophone reader. There’s also something a bit stereotypical about the names themselves. If you or I were faking a letter from a chemical-dealing woman, we’d never choose any of those names.

2. “subject: Lucy’s message from China.” When would this be an appropriate subject heading for an email? Answer: if you and I both knew someone named Lucy, if she were on a trip to China, if you had recently told me that you had received an email from her in China, and you were forwarding it to me as promised. What if I were to send someone an email called “Graham’s message from Egypt”? This sort of structure simply isn’t used for first person speech. (Maybe it is, in Chinese. Perhaps this is coming straight from Chinese usage; I know nothing of the language.)

3. “Dear sirs.” Not strictly incorrect, but the plural seems vaguely inappropriate here. You would use the plural when addressing a corporate body, not when spamming individual email accounts.

4. “Have a nice day!” Perfectly valid, except that we would never say this at the beginning of a conversation. It always comes at the end, and is used almost entirely in casual, semi-friendly interactions that are neither too close nor too distant. You wouldn’t say “Have a nice day!” in a business letter (it’s too informal for that), but you also wouldn’t say it to a friend or family member (it’s too empty for that). “Have a nice day!” would be said to someone you just chatted with in a friendly manner for 10 seconds at a supermarket but have no intention or expectation of ever seeing again in your life.

5. “We can offer you chemical products.” Again, this is completely correct in grammatical terms. But no one would ever say it. Why not? Hard to put one’s finger on it. It’s certainly a bit abrupt, as sales pitches go.

6. “Let me introduce our company to you.” This is the e-mail’s closest brush with bad grammar, but it’s really just slightly awkward rather than incorrect.

In a beginner’s English class you would have to give this email 100 points out of 100, because it does nothing wrong. But in an advanced English class, you’d have to give it a failing grade, because it is still completely inept in terms of usage.

And here’s what interests me. Grammatical rules and vocabularies change over time in any language. And we might think that the future of the English language will involve an infusion of foreign vocabulary and an increasing amount of pidgin grammar.

However, even if the vocabulary and grammar of English were to remain frozen in its current position, the language could still evolve into an almost unrecognizable form, simply through usage violations of the sort we see above.

And something else interests me. Let’s say a future scholar of the English language, 1000 years from now, were to run across the email from Lucy above. Most likely they would not be able to find anything wrong with it at all. I would imagine that Romans of the classical period would laugh their heads off at medieval Latin for much the same reason.