I guess this is about as miscellaneous as it gets. Today I received an email from my online bank. I won’t name the bank, but if you can read between the lines, I think you’ll Discover who it is.
They alerted me to an important new message in the secure message center. And the alert included this:
Please review this message at your soonest convenience.
I actually thought this was a spam or hack attempt because of that construction. Apparently it’s correct grammar but it sure sounds weird to me. I’ve rarely seen soonest used at all, and I’ve never seen it used like that. Normally, “earliest convenience” seems to be the popular construction.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think it’s at least clunky?
It’s a little archaic and formal, like signing your name, ‘your most obedient servant’, but it was once perfectly normal in a business letter. Whether it still is, I can’t say.
Is that maybe English but not 'Murrican? If the folks writing and approving those messages are in e.g. Bangalore, their constructions are likely to be a bit different than we’re used to.
Ya know, I’m now not so sure it IS correct usage. The “real” online dictionaries say it’s an adverb. So, (if correctly recalling my long ago schooling) it can’t modify a noun. “Convenience” to me is a noun.
I can see “The soonest I can get there is Tuesday.” Also, “the soonest possible time” is apparently correct. So modifying a verb and an adjective in those two cases.
I’m now thinking that “soonest convenience” was put together by someone not well versed in English, OR maybe AI is rearing its ugly head. So maybe my first inclination was correct, that it’s not proper English usage.
The phrase was prevalent enough in US correspondence 20+ years ago. Like mentioned above, it’s just one of those formal phases you only saw in business letters.