Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 21, 2008

Mike did a bad job with your etiquette, Alex.

Google it Alex. Oh these kids.

No one under 40 ever heard of Amy Vanderbilt.

stpatme, maybe not Amy V., but don’t they know about Ann, Abby, and Martha?

Well, of course today that would be 28,000 emails. A staffer would compile a mass address list and Lacey )or the same staffer) would have to only send it out once.

ugh… not on my server. They’d have to divide the list up into groups of not more than 50 each, save the email as a draft, and send it separately to each subgroup.

I don’t think they were big on e-mailing back in those days folks. When she meant ‘write’ that’s probably what she meant. Gotta Luv them hand-written sentiments.

Lacey would never use such devices as email, fax or even text messaging. She was a woman of class and would not use modern devices for thank you notes.

28,000 Thank-you Notes is a lot to do that either Lacey or Alex works on till their hands wear out stiffly and numbly.

wildmustang1262-along those lines, are you CAPABLE of speaking, let alone, writing, proper English? Just asking…

C’mon people - Lacey’s knowledge of email is secondary to her appearance in today’s strip!

It’s so nice to see her again!

Meanwhile, back in 1986 there wasn’t any email, and by 1995, you were lucky to have AOL, Prodigy or Compuserve…

What a surprise, a redskins fan is a loud-mouthed ignoramus. Who’d a-thunk it?

Gweedo Murray says:

It came to light about a month or so back that Wildmustang1262 is deaf and that English is her second language.

Correct, Gweedo, except that Wildmustang is a guy. English is his second language, and he uses a dictionary to look up words that he’s not familiar with. Since he can’t hear how normal conversations go, he does his best to approximate them. We all know and like wildmustang. Being an adult, you might have recognized that he was not a native English speaker by his phrasing and syntax.

The grammatical structure of Sign is very different from that of English. If you will examine Wildmustang’s sentence carefully, you will see that it is technically error-free, except that I probably would not have capped Thank or Notes (but that could be a judgment call). The subject is a collective; hence the single verb in the main clause is correct. Only the rhythm is different from what one would expect from a hearing writer whose native tongue was spoken English. In contrast, Redskins Fan, your post was not only discourteous but contained its own errors in capitalization and punctuation. Since you live in a glass house, you might want to back away slowly from that pile of stones you have amassed.

I’m offended that so many of you have cast the younger generation as ill-mannered and with out proper etiquette.

I’m in my early forties and was brought up to write thank you notes, be gracious and polite. My parents were/are hippies who did their fair share of smoking and yet, we knew what are responsibilities and obligations were.

I receive hand written thank you notes and cards from many of my nieces and nephews; age ranging from 18 to 4. The 18 year old loves to text message and IM. She also writes thank you notes.

We are talking about our future and it is disheartening to believe we think so little of them.

Gweedo, margueritem and 4deerinmyyard…… Thank you all for the great responses regarding wildmustang!!