In a slower, gentler era, public figures used to retain their letters in the expectation that they might one day be published. In the age of the email, the disclosure of personal correspondence is a thoroughly modern nightmare for many.
One morning in 2002, 158 former Enron employees woke up to this ordeal when 619,446 of their messages were released to the world by the Federal Energy Regulation Commission as it investigated the company’s accounting scandal.
The contents are a mixture of the commonplace, the scurrilous and the pathetic. “Do you remember when [so-and-so] tried to eat eight Big Macs and hurled instead?” one message reads. “You can be my special little email pal for the time being,” another male worker wrote to a female friend.
For academic linguists, however, the Enron corpus has turned out to be what the toilet graffiti of Pompeii and the inane scribblings on the Oxyrhynchus papyri were to classical scholars: a precious window into the way ordinary people write when they think nobody else is looking.
Statistical analysis of the emails has revealed that senior male executives rarely bother with greetings, while women are more likely to begin with the word “Hi”. More strikingly, a British researcher has found that he can work out who wrote a message with an accuracy as high as 95 per cent simply by counting innocuous phrases. Others are developing tools for police to profile the authors of documents from their characteristic patterns of expression.
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There is no escape. The only thing to be done is to put a little more care and politeness into our prose. It costs nothing more than a few seconds to start an email with the word “Dear” or to thank someone who has done you a good turn. After all, you never know who might be reading.