Why “per my last email” often feels like the most passive-aggressive sentence in the English language

Picture the message landing in your inbox. It opens with your name, maybe even a pleasant enough greeting, and then, three words in: “Per my last email.”

Nothing about the sentence that follows is rude on paper. It is polite, grammatically clean, and technically just a pointer back to information that already exists.

And yet something in your chest tightens anyway, because you already know exactly what is being said underneath the words that are actually there.

That gap between what the sentence says and what it does is the whole story. Very few phrases in everyday English carry so much unstated meaning while looking so innocent on the surface.

It is worth admitting the other side of that inbox moment too. Most people who type the phrase have usually already asked once, gotten no answer, and asked again in a slightly different way.

By the time “per my last email” shows up, someone has typically stopped trying to sound patient and started trying to sound documented, the way a person’s tone changes on the third unanswered request rather than the first.

What the phrase pretends to be doing

On paper, the phrase is doing a reasonable job. It saves the sender from retyping an answer, and it points the reader back to a place where the information already exists.

If that were all it did, nobody would mind it. But a 2023 survey of 1,000 Americans by the language platform Preply found that “per my last email” ranked as the single most passive-aggressive phrase used in workplace email, ahead of competitors like “as previously mentioned” and “just a gentle reminder.” Sylvia Johnson, the survey’s head of methodology, explained the mechanism directly: the phrase reads as passive-aggressive because “the implied message is ‘I already sent an email about this! Did you not read it?'”

That implied message is doing all the actual work in the sentence, and it is never once stated outright. Nobody using the phrase has technically accused anyone of not reading, not paying attention, or wasting anyone’s time. But the accusation lands anyway, which is precisely what makes it feel so pointed. If it were said out loud in the same words, it would sound almost too polite to be an insult. Written down and re-sent as a pointed follow-up, it reads as exactly the opposite.

Why indirectness reads as hostility

There is a reason this particular kind of politeness backfires instead of softening anything. Linguists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, in their 1987 study of politeness across languages, described most everyday requests, corrections, and reminders as acts that carry some risk of damaging the other person’s sense of standing in the conversation, a risk they called a face-threatening act. Their broader argument was that people manage this risk by wrapping the risky part of a message in extra formality, distance, or indirection, precisely the kind of hedge that “per my last email” appears to offer.

The trouble is that the hedge only works when the underlying message is genuinely neutral. When there is real irritation sitting underneath the formal wrapping, the formality itself becomes the tell. A sentence that is more polite than the situation calls for stops reading as considerate and starts reading as a performance, one where everyone involved can sense the gap between the calm wording and the actual temperature of the message. The politeness becomes the accusation’s delivery system rather than a cushion around it.

Brown and Levinson’s framework also distinguishes between two different things a message can threaten: a person’s desire to be liked and included, and a person’s desire to be left alone and not imposed on. A blunt “you didn’t read my email” would threaten the first kind directly, which is exactly why almost nobody writes it that way. “Per my last email” is built to threaten the same thing while looking, on its face, like it is protecting the reader’s dignity rather than attacking it. That mismatch between the apparent function of the words and their actual effect is what turns the phrase from an honest jab into a trap: technically defensible, felt as an attack.

What it costs when this keeps happening

None of this stays contained to one uncomfortable moment in an inbox. In the same Preply survey, 83% of respondents said they had received a passive-aggressive email at work, and 42% said one had come from their own boss specifically. Kristin Naragon, Adobe’s director of email solutions, told CNBC that phrases like this one carry real relationship risk: “This can damage relationships and ultimately, morale.”

It is worth being clear about what this evidence can and cannot support. These are self-reported survey findings about how people feel after receiving certain phrases, not a controlled study of what the sender actually intended, so the numbers describe perception and its downstream effects rather than proof of anyone’s motive. Still, perception is precisely what is at stake here. Whether or not the sender meant any harm, the read lands as hostile often enough that entire workplace guides now exist just to talk people out of typing it.

The same survey found something that matches how these exchanges tend to feel from the inside: nearly a third of people who admitted to sending a passive-aggressive email said they were replying to one they had just received. The pattern often plays out as a short, self-reinforcing loop: one person’s clipped follow-up becomes the next person’s excuse to clip back.

The alternative is just saying the actual thing

The honest fix starts with deciding what you actually want to say, then saying it. If the real message is “you missed this, and I need an answer,” a direct version of that sentence, without the borrowed formality, tends to land better than any dressed-up substitute, because it removes the gap between wording and intent that made the original phrase sting in the first place. If the real message is genuinely neutral, a plain “following up on this” carries none of the same baggage, because it isn’t trying to smuggle a complaint past the reader’s guard.

What makes “per my last email” such a durable case study is that it never needed to be rude to become the most hated sentence in office correspondence. It only needed to be polite enough to sound deniable, and pointed enough that nobody was ever fooled.