Correct. I think it's also a bit of a shibboleth now, like not wearing a suit. In former days the lower ranked employees wore jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, etc. and the bosses all wore suits and ties. Now it's the opposite at least in tech. If you see someone in "business" attire, you know they're middle management or sales and have no power, where if someone is in a tshirt and jeans they're probably a founder or executive. It's a flex to dress casual.
Another dimension to this is native vs 2nd language speakers.
For those of us who had to learn English, we put a lot of effort into grammar, while native speakers whip out half-baked sentences without a second thought.
I think about the email i sent that was to be read by the CTO and i not only ensured it was totally correct, i asked a colleague to proofread it.
- Signalling: I dress more formally than everyone else to make up for the fact I'm less professional in other ways
- No signalling: I dress like everyone else because I am like everyone else
- Countersignalling: I wear ratty old clothes with holes in them, and nobody will dare to question it because I'm the important one here
But to expand on the spelling topic, good spelling and grammar is now free with AI tools. It no longer signals being educated. Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.
I live in a wealthy town. It’s less sinister than explicit counter signaling. More that I’ll wear comfortable clothes until they wear out because I have better things to do with my time than shop, and I don’t need to use dress anymore to get the access I want and need.
I’ve been thinking about going and getting grocery privilege today but I could use delivery privilege instead.
I think it's a consequence of having more and more people asking you things (on the downward side), while being responsible for decisions of more critical importance (on the upward side) as you go further up the chain of command.
In the example the author writes about, the privilege is not "being a bag grammar person", it's being a high-ranking person. The bad grammar is the thing that those people are able to get away with.
IMO, he's confusing the disease with the symptom, so to speak.
Separately, I would say that high-ranking people can definitely get away with short emails, and to some extent brusque emails. Bad grammar is perhaps just the next domino to topple.
But let's not pretend that, at least in the US, that's what it's limited to. Our current and immediate past president are both elderly men with potentially compromised mental states who regularly say crazy nonsense stuff.
Try watching this (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=455169079910588) or this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZsdlULgqvA) and then watch the literal crowds of people who are saying "you just don't understand! You're not parsing it right! You're not paying enough attention to their genius!"
It's wild that we make excuses like this for people. One has to ask where the line is.
This almost certainly happens in business, too - it's just not as obvious because those folks don't have to constantly do it in public.
That said, using good grammar is never a bad thing and depending on the subject matter and relationships between the respective communicators, short-hand can be both a deliberate obfuscation practice and social coding of the intimacy of the respective relationships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
This was a, tongue in cheek, distinction between the language used by the posh and by the aspiring-posh. It's seems analogous to the OP's sense of boss vs non-boss language and diction, which I believe exists.
Sent from my iPhone
Before going into the workforce, we're usually taught professionals are expected to communicate like professionals 100% of the time. It's just the safer bet to make as it's simply a lot harder (though certainly not impossible) to foul things up in a professional situation by having good grammar and well written emails than vice versa.
That said, it seems like most people I've ever actually worked with (on any level) do not like communicating 100% professionally the majority of the time (especially in small groups/directly) and may actually consider THAT disrespectful. Some from practicality ("don't waste so much time on an email we could have talked through casually in a minute" etc), some for just having different social expectations ("We've worked together for 3 years, why are you sounding like a door-to-door salesman about to make a pitch to me instead of just saying you had a thought" etc), or a laundry list of other reasons. Telling when and how much professionalism is expected is just something you have to learn to read the individual/crowd for, but it's probably a positive signal a lot less often than the author assumes it usually is.
Who told you that?
Or maybe... what state do you work in? I cannot even imagine starting the HR process to fire someone because of bad emails.
This probably isn’t true, though. But you didn’t want to test your luck, so you took the safe route of carefully crafting your emails. The privilege is not worrying about being fired over trivial reasons.
You make it hard enough that someone needs years of expensive education or has to be born in the right family that speaks the right way, and now all we can do it try to meet that arbitrary standard. Everyone will struggle, so the act of calling it out is a choice, rather than a fact. If someone lets that mask slip, IMO it's because they're not worried about being accused of occupying the wrong side of the line, rather than any lack of "trying". Trying sort of implies there is a goal to hit.
Not sure why they would have to do OCR on emails. Were they printed out? On PDF for some reason? The decoding thing I kinda get but that you can easily point out because of all the equal signs.
Its not very long, but I use this in my daily life:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3207/pg3207-images.html...
I also use the 12 bullet points before that on Power.
> It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try.
It’s relative to the power level difference between the two parties.
We’re talking about someone (your boss) who doesn’t really need to present an appearance of professionalism to their proverbial lowly underlings.
As slapdash as their response to you might appear - if you were to observe that same person composing a reply to the CEO, I'd wager that all the hallmarks of grammatical precision and professionalism would be back in spades.
Here is what I don't understand, and what is not addressed in the post.
After you get a response from your boss that reads, "K let circle back nxt week bout it . thnks", doesn't this free you up to relax your style to your comfort level? If you see that your addressee doesn't seem to care for meticulous style, is there much point in stressing over it (and thus, in continuing with the privilege narrative)?
i would be excited that i'm being treated as a member of the inner circle and they can speak freely and casually with me.
Having said that, I started using Gmail's "polish" feature to turn "yes" into "That sounds great, let's go ahead with it" or some such corporatism. Not sure if that's much better...
As an individual contributor on a team, you may have to interface at most with 30 people on a weekly basis. As a second line leader you may have 150 people under your purview, and another 50 outsiders you have to talk to. You can’t scale the amount of time you have, so you scale the amount of time you spend on replies.
https://www.reddit.com/r/marvelstudios/comments/33tkv6/actua...
13 Feb, 2026
When I got my first real job, I used to get so nervous about writing emails to my boss. I would run spellcheck, triple-check the grammar, read over it again and again to make sure my tone sounded professional and mature and not young and stupid. After painstakingly revising the email for 30 minutes, I would send it to my boss, who would respond right away with a message that looked like:
K let circle back nxt week bout it . thnks
Sent from my iPhone
I had another job where my bosses were heavy emoji users. I would send them super professional emails, trying so hard to overcompensate for how young I was, and they would respond back with a single sentence punctuated with multiple cryface emojis (😂). To this day, I think of that emoji as "corporate" since professionals love to use it for whatever reason. I'm used to it now, but a decade ago I thought it was so odd. I thought we were supposed to be professionals? And professionals are supposed to write with good grammar, right?
I've been thinking a lot about this ever since the latest Epstein document dump.1 People have been uploading screenshots of emails between Epstein and Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson. And besides all the upsetting and salacious details everyone is discussing, the thing that also surprises me is how bad everyone's grammar is.
It reminded me so much of emails from bosses in my life: short, blunt (almost rude?), typos galore, weird formatting, bad grammar, "sent from iPhone", etc. It's almost as if, once you get to a certain level of power, you no longer need to try. Because the only reason people spend time crafting a well-written email is to look powerful, mature, professional. But if you're already a powerful professional, I guess technically you don't need to make an effort. And if there's no other boss above you, you can do whatever you want.
It reminds me of another email leak, the 2014 Sony Pictures hack. While everyone ooed and ahhed over a bunch of executives talking crap about celebrities, the main thing I remember from that whole scandal was how sloppy and unprofessional emails from executives looked like. I remember reading over those emails with almost a sense of jealousy. If I had sent out an email with even a quarter of the typos they had, I probably would've lost my job.
I know words like "privilege" gets thrown around a lot, and I think we all understand monetary privileges and power privileges and race privileges, but grammar privilege? That's certainly a first.
I don’t want to be impressed, I want problems to be solved.
Do your boss could still save themselves 50% of the work.
But (a) most corporate communication isn't by text, and (b) the CEO is probably from a time when there weren't any texts, so emails themselves were often used casually, in lieu of sticky notes.
In any case, I'm with you. The trope of microaggressions is way overused, and applying it to someone who is usefully communicating with you is rubbish.
I agree. Or at least to the extent that the complaint is that bad grammar signifies dispensing with formality, dispensing with formality is often a courtesy.
Too many people have it drilled into them that "If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well" when in reality if a job is worth doing, it is often worth doing very badly indeed, because it really, really just needs to be done.
It takes a large amount of very unproductive navel-gazing to assume that a message that unequivocally gives you the information you need, yet that doesn't measure up to your own perceptions of how much effort should have gone into the crafting of the email, is an insult directed at you, rather than a focus on the message rather than the medium.
Even if Marshall McLuhan's dictum is correctly applied to this scenario, the message conveyed by the medium could well be "Stop wasting so much time agonizing over phrasing! Just spit it out!" rather than "I'm better than you so I can get away with sloppy shit that I would excoriate you for."
After all, you don't know the limits of your power until someone quits. So abuse people, exhibit outlandish public behavior, say racist or otherwise objectionable things...every person who remains on your payroll is a sign of how powerful you are.
This is not a common tactic, but it's a highly visible tactic, and it's not hard to find some notable examples out there right now.
And the companies adding the footer? Their attack lawyers are assholes trying to scare everybody.
Fuck them.
I'm not buying your argument. The amount of additional time that it would have taken to write that same message with proper grammar and spelling is minuscule.
But [that's not what happened here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question)
That is exactly why executive grammar is so bad.