Me, myself and ‘hi’ – why ‘hi’ in emails makes me uncomfortable
Thursday, October 11, 2012 at 10:00AM 
I have a problem with ‘hi’. I can tolerate it as a spoken salutation, but written down in emails and texts, I find it hard to cope with. And it’s becoming a bit of an issue for me because it seems to be the standard greeting for business emails now. I reckon that’s because it’s deemed the casual and friendly option. There’s no place for ‘dear’ any more, unless you’re writing about a particularly sober matter. But there is something sad about team members writing ‘hi’ to each other all day, instead of saying it out loud.
‘Hi’ in work emails seeks to borrow a casual chirpiness from social life. But it’s unconvincing and forced. It’s the communications equivalent of dress-down Friday. And because it’s being used in business now, when I get ‘hi’ from my friends, I find it alarmingly formal. If a friend texts me with ‘Hi Maddie’, it reminds me of my work life, so I feel as if a guard has been put up, or that I might be about to be told off for something. As an MC, I generally feel I’m in trouble most of the time, so I could certainly do without the extra impetus.
Reader Comments (5)
Nobody says Hi where I work! It's still all "Dear".
What I loathe, however, is "I trust you are well" or "I hope this finds you well". Arrggggh.
HI! You put 'Dear' on a letter - nothing offensive about 'hi' in an email.
I concur. I particularly object to the use of a cheery hi! when it is followed by a brief upbeat sentence which then gives way to several hundred words of annoying nit-picking work nonsense. "Hi, just to say the project is looking great and we're really pleased with progress so far. Just a few points to raise…" etc etc. It makes the "Hi" seem insincere and even devious.
So what do you do in business e-mail, where you're cold-contacting someone whose name you don't know?
Also, e-mail is hyphenated, and it's already plural, so you don't need to say e-mails. And Internet is always capitalized.
'Dear' and all those 'Best wishes' and Yours faithfully's and all are all meaningless formalities. And we need them - of course they should be meaningless and unnoticable - they are just ways of being polite in salutation and farewell.
But the old ones are not right in emails. They dead now.
So we all have a problem. Going to take some time to work out and find something comfortable for us all.