Life & Wisdom Quote by Judith Martin

Martin’s line is a small act of cultural triage: it ranks media the way etiquette has always ranked gestures. An email gets a glance because it arrives weightless, frictionless, and infinitely repeatable. A “real letter” demands attention because someone paid for the stamp, found the address, sat with the thought long enough to commit it to paper, then waited. The message isn’t that handwriting is inherently nobler; it’s that effort is legible, and we respond to what costs something.

The intent is quietly corrective. As “Miss Manners,” Martin has spent decades translating social anxiety into rules that protect people from being treated like clutter. Here she’s pointing to a modern failing that etiquette still knows how to name: when communication becomes too easy, courtesy becomes optional. Email’s convenience flattens urgency and intimacy into the same inbox stack, so we learn to skim everyone. A letter, by contrast, is a curated interruption. It earns the recipient’s time by proving the sender spent theirs first.

The subtext is also a warning about status. Attention is a currency, and the medium signals how much the sender believes you’re worth. In an era of mass outreach, templates, and CC’d obligations, the letter is a scarce object, almost a luxury good. Martin isn’t pining for nostalgia; she’s diagnosing a shift in how we measure sincerity. We’re not moved by paper. We’re moved by the visible trace of intention.