How Polite Latinos Are!

I am taking the One Month Spanish course, and the first lesson is about the elaborate greetings used in ordinary Spanish.

There must be several reasons for this, the most obvious being that Latin America imported its Spanish directly from Spain, in the 16th Century, and did not try to improve on it.

Even in English, people still write "Dear Sir," when this formality no longer exists in the spoken language.

And Spanish is more verbose, it uses more characters to say the same thing. English is more efficient and is preferred for business purposes. Spanish is preferred if emotions are being expressed freely.