Regarding "re"

A lot of language experts will tell you to avoid the word “re,” as in, “I’d like to speak to you re scheduling.” It’s pretentious, they say, to use this Latin derivative instead of good old plain English — it’s “tasteless as a gold toothpick,” according to Theodore Bernstein’s 1965 guide “The Careful Writer.”  All of us outside the legal profession should “leave this one to the lawyers,” he wrote.

Way ahead of you, Bernstein and friends. I’ve been avoiding “re” my whole life. But unfortunately, I can’t claim that my motive has been to eschew pretentiousness, humbly sidestepping every opportunity to show off my deep knowledge of this preposition and its Latin origins.

No, I avoid it because I’ve never understood “re” well enough to even feign pretentiousness. I avoid “re” not because I’m down to earth but because I’m downright intimidated.

Is it “re:” with a colon? Is the R capitalized? Can you use it in the body of a letter or email, or only in the header or subject line? If it’s an abbreviation of “regarding,” does it need a period at the end, or does a colon preclude the need for a period? And why do you sometimes see “in” before “re”? Wouldn’t that be redundant?

The answers to all these questions are surprising — at least to me. For starters “re” is not an abbreviation for “regarding.” It’s a preposition — a real word like “at,” “of” or “with.” It’s defined not as “regarding” but as “with regard to” or “in the matter of,” which makes it a subtle shade different from “regarding” in some uses.

 “Re” doesn’t even share the same roots as “regarding.” It’s from a Latin noun, “res,” which meant “thing” or “matter.” That’s a clue why “in” is sometimes used before “re.” It’s like saying “in the matter of.” But the way Latin grammar worked, the “in” may be implied, anyway. So it’s hard to know whether “in re” or just “re” better captures “res” in what’s called the Latin “ablative” case. At least that’s the assessment of someone who gave up after half a day trying to understand Latin noun cases. (Ahem.)  

What I do know after half a day buried in books is that, in English, the “in” is optional. One of the definitions for the preposition “re” is “in re” — that is, they mean the same thing. So you can choose.

Another thing I learned is that “re” should not be capitalized unless it begins a sentence. It’s a regular word, so it works like one. Just as you don’t write “Put the book On the table,” you don’t write “See me tomorrow Re scheduling.” In fact, you’d be using the wrong word. Beginning with a capital, Re is the abbreviation for rhenium, a heavy metal.

Because “re” is a regular word, it doesn’t automatically get a colon, nor does a longer  phrase like “Re scheduling: See me tomorrow.” Yes, a colon can be used this way, but not because “re” requires it, only because in many instances the colon helps the whole sentence.

Using “re” was hard enough before email came along. Now “Re:” gets automatically added to subject lines when we reply to another message. And whoever came up with that system didn’t bother to tell us whether “Re:” was short for “regarding” or it meant a “reply” to the original email.

I say don’t worry about appearing pretentious if you use “re,” but you might consider whether it’s distracting. We’re so unused to seeing it used correctly in the middle of a sentence, lowercase with no colon, that it will surely look weird to your reader.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2025 at 11:59 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.