Well sometimes it’s “If you buy our overpriced product, you’ll be able to obtain something you would normally have to pay for for free”. There was a device being heavily advertised online a while back that made the claim “This ingenious* device gives you free cable TV!” (paraphrased, but that’s the gist of it). I Googled the name of the product out of curiosity as to how exactly it get you free cable, and I found a review of it on YouTube. It turns out the device is an antenna! And a pretty basic, crappy antenna at that. The part about getting free cable was a complete lie, as I should have known.
*Hey, that’s a good one for this thread, “ingenious”. That one’s right up there with “weird trick”.
Yes, Cleanse my bung hole, cleanse my toe cheese, cleanse my bowels, cleanse my ear wax, cleanse my eyebrow mites, cleanse my skin, cleanse my toilet bowl, cleanse my wallet.
I’ve always understood it to mean “regarding”, as it does in other correspondence. I always thought this obvious.
An email is a reply if it comes from someone you’ve just sent something to. You don’t need an indication that it’s a reply. However, you might well need an indication of what it is regarding.
FWIW, this is the response that Copilot gave me when I asked the question: ‘What does ‘Re:’ mean in an email subject line?’
The ‘Re:’ in an email subject line stands for “regarding” or “in response to.” It’s automatically added when replying to an email, indicating that the message is part of a continuing conversation or thread. So, if you see ‘Re:’ before a subject, it means the email is a reply to a previous message on that topic.
Re: in the subject line of an email means "reply " or "response ". Always. So in this context don’t use it when you mean “regarding”, but when you’re replying to an email. Most email applications will add Re: to the subject automatically for you when you click the Reply button.
I learned it as as shortened form of the Latin res meaning thing as in “the thing of which this is.” I don’t think that’s correct because why shorten something from 3 letters to 2?
That’s how it’s used in the legal phrase “in re” (in the matter of). It’s shortened from three letters to two because “re” (or rē) is the ablative form of “res.”
The education industry is full of them, but the worst I can think of is “research-based”. They want you to take their words for it rather than evaluate the “research” it’s based upon.
