If you didn’t encounter “dear” enough for its meaning to wash out, and the post-letter-writing generations may not have, it feels oddly like calling your boss or your professor your darling. Even if individual people adopt “dear” for older correspondents, as I did, it’s doomed in the long run if people aren’t using it among their peers, as I would never, never do. Reading through the comments on etiquette posts shows a tendency for younger people to resist advice to use “dear,” not through a desire to be rude or informal, but because they simply cannot parse it as anything but intimate.
