What It Means

So, people sometimes ask me, why "By The Card"?  What on earth does it mean?

When I was looking for a name for my Etsy store, I turned to my husband, a professional philologist, who pulled out his trusty, dusty O.E.D. (that's the Oxford English Dictionary, if you weren't sure).  Knowing my love of wordplay and puns, he suggested the phrase "by the card", which according to the O.E.D. means exactly what it says in my store heading--to speak genteelly, with care and nicety. 

I liked the idea of reverting to an old-fashioned sense of what it means to communicate with others.  Everybody loves to get a letter in the mail.  When I sent out my wedding save the dates and invitations, it was one of the first times I had actually sent physical mail to many of my friends and family; I loved picturing the pieces of mail that I had lovely handcrafted making their journeys by sea and by plane and by truck all over the globe.

So, By The Card it was, especially taking into account the pun bonus ("buy the card!  get it?").

I recently googled the phrase, and came up with a fabulous New York Times article from July of 1873 (!), mourning the decline in the art of letter-writing.  While the piece mostly places blame for this on the shoulders of the growing "publicity" of the mail service: just think of all of the letter-carriers and nosy boarding-house matrons who would be able to read your private and possibly sentimental correspondence!  I wonder what the author would attribute the decline in formal letter-writing to today?

Here's the link to the piece (it's a PDF, so you must have Adobe Acrobat to read):
http://tinyurl.com/ykzuv9r