Salutations and valedictions
The Latin etymology of salutation/valediction is muddled ('wale means hail'); valediction comes from vale (farewell) + dicere (to say). Interventions don't test the etymology.
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David and Paige show how commas are used in letters and emails. A comma goes after the greeting ("Dear Prudence,") to separate it from the body, and after the closing ("With love,") before the writer's name. The opening is called the salutation and the closing is called the valediction.
You'll be able to
- put a comma after the greeting of a letter or email.
- put a comma after the closing of a letter or email.
- tell a salutation from a valediction.
Key words
- correspondence
- Letters, emails and other messages written to someone.
- salutation
- The greeting that opens a letter, such as "Dear Prudence,".
- valediction
- The goodbye phrase that closes a letter, such as "With love,".
Transcript
- [Voiceover] Hello grammarians and hello Paige.
- Hi David. - Today we're gonna be talking about commas in correspondence and what that means is how to use commas in letter writing, so saying hello and saying goodbye. When you start writing letter or an e-mail to somebody, you use commas so let me show you an example.
So if you're writing a letter to someone you open it with something like this. Dear Prudence comma I received the plum jam you sent me. You can see we have this little comma here because what commas do, right, is that they separate elements of the sentence from one another.
So what we're doing here with this comma is we're putting it after the greeting to separate it from the body text. So that's how you begin a letter or an email with a comma after the, you know, dear part or the hello Prudence comma part you know, whatever it is, but Paige, how do you use commas toward the end of correspondence of emails and stuff?
- Great, so at the end of a letter or an email you'll use a comma in a sort of similar way to how you use it at the beginning so you'll say something like with love comma Bruce Ben-Bacharach
- So okay, we can use them at the beginning like this. Dear Prudence comma or we can use it at the end. The endings of letters. So this has a technical name. We were discussing this before we started recording so if you open a letter, that's called the salutation which is another way to say hi and the way you end a letter is called a valediction which is like saying hail, I think wale in latin means hail.
I think salu is hello and wale, or vale is goodbye and so this is really just like a helloining and a goodbye saying so if you're saying hello in a letter or an email you use a comma. If you're saying goodbye in a letter or email...
- Use a comma. - You can learn anything. David out.
- Paige out.
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