"The below"

[DressageNut]

I have a colleague who frequently forwards emails to me and asks me to see "the below". "The following" or "the attached" I would accept without question, but "the below" always makes me slightly uneasy. Any thoughts?

totally wrong, yes.

Well if he or she is forwarding, then isn't the email being forwarded below hte new one?

"the following" is shorthand for "the following email" i.e. it is the definite article and an adjective without its noun.

"below" is a preposition, which describes a relationship between things. You can't attach the definite article to a preposition. So "see below" is acceptable but "the below" is not.

senua I can't see the logic in that. If you say that you can abbreviate a noun-adjective phrase to just the adjective then why can't you abbreviate a noun-preposition phrase?

You could equally argue that "see the below" is shorthand for "see the email below".

It's not very elegant but I don't know about "totally wrong". Standard shorthand, I'd say.

also, since it's widely accepted that "above" can function as an adjective, wouldn't it be only consistent to say that "below" can be an adjective too?

After all you can say "the above email".

Pmsl @ being uneasy about a phrase you understand perfectly well

theyoung is right

oh i missed thepoint completely
agree with the below

You could equally argue that "see the below" is shorthand for "see the email below".

A preposition describes the relationship between things eg the cat sat on the mat. The phrase "see the email below" is already shortened - it should be "see the *email below this one" - so to further shorten it so that both items being described is pushing things a little too far.

'Above' and 'below' are prepositions, they are not adjectives. To attach the definite article to a preposition is wrong, wrong, wrong!

it should be "see the email below this one" - so to further shorten it, so that both items being described are omitted, is pushing things a little too far.

How ironic to omit the reference to omission.

Grr @ SPB

above is totally accepted as an adjective as well as a preposition.

Things can have two functions you know!

"above is totally accepted as an adjective as well as a preposition."

Not in the dictionaries that I checked!
I would of thought that Pedants' Corner was the last place to accept 'common usage' as a convincing excuse.

what dictionaries did you check?

The Concise Oxford lists "above - prep., adv., adj., & n."

I originally consulted Chambers then Wikipedia. But the Oxford Junior Dictionary, the Collins School Dictionary and askoxford/OUP all agree: 'below' is a preposition and an adverb. I can find no reference to adjective nor noun.

Webster's does say that it can be an adverb, a preposition, a noun or an adjective but I might point out that Webster's is American and our US cousins have problems with differentiating things like nouns and verbs so they don't count.

I'd say that the Junior Oxford and the Collins school are probably too short to contain all the variants. They are very abridged versions and tend to contain only the main uses for each word (as well as a shorter selection of words of course).

The Concise Oxford is longer and more comprehensive than either of those and since it lists "above" as an adjective, that will undoubtedly be in the OED too since it's the Concise version of the OED.

also Wiktionary (dictionary version of wiki) DOES list above as an adjective see here en.wiktionary.org/wiki/above#Adjective

Just because a very concise dictionary doesn't include above as an adjective, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means the dictionary is too short to include it.

The wiki basically says what you said: common usage.

But please feel free to promulgate inelegant phrases if that's what you want.

Don't you wish the OED was open to everyone? Then we wouldn't have to reference Webster or Wiki.

It makes perfect sense, you understand the meaning of the sentence, it is unambiguous, it is easy to see what the full sentence might be (see the email below this one). Your uneasiness is unjustified IMO.

Thanks everyone - all very interesting. On balance, I think I shall remain uneasy .

Hurrah for uneasiness.

or should it be 'unease'?

PMSL @ Senua being so picky and then writing "I would of thought..."

it should be "see the email below this one"

Ummmm, just to split hairs, it's surely now just one e-mail, with a line of text inserted before the original message.

Or did you mean that this would be in a separate message, and you assume the message "below" will be your "forwarded" message (but might not be, depending on what e-mail software is used, or if anyone else happens to send a message between your first and second.)

Sorry, couldn't resist! and am only playing, it's not a serious issue...

(Comes from years of trying to visualise the screen as seen by someone else, where they may or may not have adjusted settings - or more likely, my settings are no longer the 'defaults' so don't match what they saw. That was before the days of LogMeIn.com where I can now usually see exactly what they see on their screen, while using my mouse and keyboard to control their PC.)

Hmm, common netiquette dictates that you reply below the original message, while reducing the quoting of that original message to the bare minimum needed to make sense.

I agree, but in the past Microsoft's e-mail (Outlook Express) and some other bits of software placed the prompt at the top of the page. Unfortunately some lazy sods people considered this an "invitation to type" without any pruning of the message, and therefore got into that awful habit where they would write their "response" immediately.

Of course, it went further, and the same lazy people were in the habit of "top posting" in USENET newsgroups, where they were criticised as being bloody newbies.

It seems perfectly logical to process an incoming message in sequence, perhaps splitting individual queries and writing one's response immediately after each query, while deleting anything which is no longer required - thus making the complete message a series of Q+A items, and if there needs to be a lengthy exchange of correspondence the chronology is maintained, rather than some hotch-potch that becomes more and more difficult to understand even as a participant, and really awkward if one was reading it as a third party / historian / investigator.

I was going to give an example, but the "Two Ronnies" sketch where the answers to questions came in advance of the questions shows the confusion to great effect!