Regarding 'regards'

I hate the word 'regards'.

'I'm ringing you regards your claim...'
 'Re: your concerns about our re-widgeting service'
 'Regarding our conversation yesterday...'

Whatever’s coming next, I think, it won’t be good news. The tone sets my teeth on edge. It just sounds like a word you'd use in an earlier age, perhaps the 1930s, when it might have sounded both suave and deferential.

The time for ‘regards’ has gone, I think. To me, it sounds like the rote mutterings of a bureaucratic zombie. Something said by someone who feels defensive, perhaps powerless, and wants to hide behind words to and stick to the script, no matter (regardless) of what they’re really thinking.

Write as you'd really talk
 
Who says 'regards' when they're having a brew (hot or cold...) with a friend? Or talking with their 10-year-old child?

If we want our writing to connect with our readers, we need to use the direct words we’d use when we’re talking. Really talking. So why not just say 'about'? ‘Even though’?

Okay, I've got that off my chest. Thank you for reading. So what's your least favourite word?

Oh, one more thing. A colleague of mine in London once said ‘irregardless’. Gentle reader, I simply gaped.

Get off the bus with that language!

I spotted this sign on one of the new Go Wellington buses.

The word ‘standees’ bothered me. I wonder if the sign could just say ‘Please don’t stand behind this line’.

At first I thought they’d made a laughable mistake, and that ‘standee’ meant ‘person or thing being stood on’. But no; Go Wellington has used ‘standee’ correctly. I checked the Oxford Dictionary and I stand corrected. Their use of ‘standee’ is spot on, even if it isn’t commonly used. The big book says:

standee: noun — a person who is standing rather than seated, especially in a passenger vehicle.

But is ‘standee’ plain and clear? If English wasn't your first language, would you immediately get the message? Many bus passengers are new to New Zealand and may not understand it on first reading.

And it’s exactly the kind of bureaucratic language that makes customers feel distanced from the Council, which does so much to serve them. I’m a big fan of the Wellington City Council and its services and amenities.

But this language is absolutely positively not reader-focused!