I see Gawker got a review copy of the Complete New Yorker hard drive. Perhaps you’re happier sharing a burger with Mike Damone instead of the Rat, your sweet old standby selling tickets at the cineplex. Or would I rather be Judge Reinhold? Hmm…perhaps I would.

Vindication at last. Lola Ogunnaike writes:

Mr. Troutwine is not alone in thinking that an e-mail sender who writes “Best,” then a name, is offering something close to a brush-off. He said he chooses his own business sign-offs in a descending order of cordiality, from “Warmest regards” to “All the best” to a curt “Sincerely.”
 
When Kim Bondy, a former CNN executive, e-mailed a suitor after a dinner date, she used one of her preferred closings: “Chat soon.” It was her way of saying, “The date went well, let’s do it again,” she said.
 
She may have been the only one who thought that. The return message closed with the dreaded “Best.” It left her feeling as though she had misread the evening. “I felt like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of formal. I don’t think he liked me,’ ” she said, laughing. “A chill came with the ‘Best.’ ” They have not gone out since.
 
“Best” does have its fans, especially in the workplace, where it can be an all-purpose step up in warmth from messages that end with no sign-off at all, just the sender coolly appending his or her name.
 
“I use ‘Best’ for all of my professional e-mails,” said Kelly Brady, a perky publicist in New York. “It’s friendly, quick and to the point.”

“Perky publicist”! That’s catty for the NYT, but it speaks volumes. (It’s the perky and the alliteration, publicist friends, not the publicist alone.) I do use “Best” myself, by the way. If you see it (with work-related exceptions), or the even more dreaded blank subject line, it is not an ambiguous sign.

Strange when you don’t post and the world doesn’t explode; you get kind of used to not using the web as a Tron-like shield to fight with the minute hand, or something like that. Nevertheless, I have links, links, and more links, and also, more important, a brand-new edition of Martin Schneider’s incomparable column The Squib Report, which you will definitely want to read, believe me. Onward with online encouragement and dissemination of extreme magazine allegiance! (Truly sorry, G.O. Just sometimes, maybe when I’m getting back into the swing of things, I need multisyllables.)

12. “hehe” for “hee hee.” “Hee hee” has been a written representation of “If you could hear me, I’d be laughing” for some time (I’ll check the OED; I bet it’s centuries). You’re only saving two letters this way and it looks like the word “he” twice. What’s next, “sheshe” for goddess types?
13. “Let’s see, I need the tuna on whole wheat.” There are also available phrases for this, e.e. “I’d like…” and “May I have…?” You need a blood transfusion, or a scalpel, or a new hed and dek pronto because it’s press day. You might even need a drink or a slap in the face or a pinch. You probably don’t need a sandwich. Be nice to the poor deli people; all they hear all day is how much people need that thing, right now, hurry it up, I’m busy and important (and rude).
14. “Moreso” is not a word. It is two words: “more so.” If you’d like to be convinced further, since you have trust issues, here’s the Word Detective on the matter:

Dear Evan: Is “moreso” a word? I can’t find it in my dictionaries; my spell-checker doesn’t like it, but I’ve been reading and hearing it everywhere recently. Two examples from the one page of the sports section: ” … and he is confident the ’96 Braves, moreso than the ’72 Braves will embrace a teenager.” “Shrouded this time by closer Mark Wohlers’ franchise-record 31st save moreso than John Smoltz’s seamless season, ….” —R. Duvall, via the Internet.
 
Your spell checker is not alone. I not only don’t like “moreso,” I don’t understand why anyone would write that way. If you had supplied only one example, I’d have said that it was almost certainly a typographical error, but if “moreso” is truly suddenly commonplace, I am deeply alarmed. Mutant words seem to be springing up in the sports section.
 
I should call a time-out at this point and mention that I am absolutely, utterly sports-illiterate, and have never read the sports section of any newspaper. Ever. Really. True, I did manage the baseball, hockey and soccer teams in high school, but my duties in each case had only a marginal relationship to the particular sport per se. My primary duty to the soccer team, for instance, seemed to be to warn our coach if I spotted the Headmaster coming, so he would have time to put away his flask. My role in the grand scheme of the hockey team, on the other hand, consisted largely of driving newly-toothless players to the Emergency Room. I became awesomely proficient in filling out hospital forms and calming distraught parents.
 
But I digress. You say that you have been reading and hearing “moreso” everywhere. Hearing it doesn’t bother me — after all, “more so” (two words) is a perfectly respectable construction meaning “to a greater extent than.” Radio and television “sportscasters” slurring the two words together doesn’t surprise me. Sportswriters jamming “more” and “so” together into one word repeatedly in print, however, is a bad idea. What about its opposite construction, “less so”? Are we now to glop these together into “lesso”? Soon we’ll be facing “inorderto” and “inspiteof,” not to mention “nottomention.” Welcome to Mars. Somebody hand me that flask.

Banned words and phrases 7-11, 4-6, and 1-3.

The monthly Speakeasy Poetry Series continues with Farrah Field, Gail Segal, Yvette Siegert, and Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo:
Sunday, November 5 @ 5:00 PM
The Bitter End, 147 Bleecker Street (btw. Thompson and LaGuardia)
Directions and more: www.speakeasynyc.com
Free to the public
About Chelsea: Since 1958, Chelsea has been a leading international literary magazine emphasizing translations and the work of emerging writers. Among those who found a place at Chelsea before they were established authors are W. S. Merwin, Sylvia Plath, A. R. Ammons, and Paul Auster.
FARRAH FIELD’s work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Harpur Palate, and Pool, among others, and is forthcoming in Margie. She teaches high school English in Manhattan.
GAIL SEGAL’s first manuscript of poems, In Gravity’s Pull, was published in 2002. Her poems have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Marlboro Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. Her most recent essay, “A Praise of Doubt,” is collected in a book of essays, Artistic Citizenship: A Public Voice for the Arts.
ANNABELLE YEESEUL YOO is a poet and classically trained pianist.
To submit work or check out Speakeasy’s online offerings, visit www.speakeasynyc.com.

7. kid lit
8. lad lit
9. chick lit
10. Sick-Chick Lit
11. tween
Banned words and phrases 1-3 and 4-6.

We’ll miss you. Keep a look out for grandmothers in wolves’ clothing, too-heavy baskets, woodsmen, forests, and stomachache. Which means nothing except remember your roots and may this bring you lots of happiness.

But don’t use spaces around them, at least in my opinion (and in Chicago‘s!). There’s a debate going on at Typophile about just this question. The consensus is “There is NO consensus,” but I like this tidy summary by contributor Michael Lewis (a seminarian, not surprisingly, given his reflexive and reflective turn to the canon):

AP style is to “put a space on both sides of a dash in all uses except the start of a paragraph [their version of a bulleted list] and sports agate summaries.” See “Punctuation” chapter.
 
Chicago style is not as explicit, but all the examples in the 15th ed. do not contain preceding or following spaces (e.g.: “It was a revival of the most potent image in modern democracy—the revolutionary idea.”). See sec. 6.87ff.
 
Strunk & White are not explicit either, but also do not include spaces (e.g.: “The rear axle began to make a noise—a grinding, chattering, teeth-gritting rasp.”). See sec. I.8.
 
Bringhurst recommends using en dashes set off with spaces: “Used as a phrase marker – thus – the en dash is set with a normal word space either side.” See sec. 5.2ff.
 
I don’t have MLA or APA style guides handy, but I’ll hunt around for ‘em — er, (bad) pun intended.

Also on Typophile, this discussion of whether cursive handwriting is going out the window. Do you still use it? Do kids still learn it? Whither cursive? (There’s a Nation cover hed for you; still got it!)