If you think it’s easy to survive to 50 or 60 or 70, lemme tell you: you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, or you come from a much more privileged background than I do.
And to me, anyone who’s managed to survive on this planet for longer than I have, get’s a modicum of respect as acknowledgement of their canniness, resourcefulness, and social skills.
Try being a complete wanker and see how long you survive. Try being inconsistent and see how long you last. Now, try being consistent for 40 fucking years so you have a roof over your head, food on your table, etc.
But I sometimes call my 3 year old son “sir.” It’s used as a matter of politeness. You treat everyone with respect until they show themselves unworthy of it. Some types of respect need to be earned (what Richard Pearse is hinting at), but “sir” and “ma’am” are givens that one loses, not gains. Do you call anyone “sir” or “ma’am”?
My response was directed at PSXer. I called people “sir” or “ma’am” when I worked retail and I’ll call strangers “mister” or “ma’am” when I’m trying to get their attention.
My mother’s a lazy, irresponsible and largely incompetent woman. She’s 50 and she’ll be 60 soon enough. If you think it’s difficult to survive to 50, you live in a third world country.
For me the default is indifference. I don’t treat strangers rudely, but neither do I extend to them markers of respect that they haven’t earned from me.
Assholes? No. However it does sound very foreign to me, and very cold. It seems like it puts a layer of stiff formality between parent and child, which I couldn’t imagine having with my own child. It would break my heart if my son felt he had to say “ma’am” to address me. I’m his mother. I’m MOM. I realize that in the south and perhaps other parts of the country it is normal and not viewed that way, but it wasn’t common where I was raised and kind of freaks me out a little when I hear it.
Where I was raised, you’d only call someone sir or ma’am if they were a cop or an officer in the military. And then, only if you didn’t know them personally.
As a teenager, I greatly looked up to my father. I loved him, I admired him, and to this day, I strive to immitate him. At the age of 14 or so I started calling him sir, because that was the best way to express my respect for him. He would gently remind me, from time to time, that I didn’t have to do it, that he wasn’t expecting it. I think he was a little nervous about what people like the OP might think. I told him that it expressed my feelings towards him, that other people who might overhear were not part of our family, and that they could take a flying frack at a rolling donut for all I cared about their opinion. 30 years later, I’m still glad I was able to express my feelings to him while he was still alive, and before that stroke took away most of his personality about 2 years later.
I didn’t grow up in the south and wasn’t taught to call anyone sir or ma’am (strangers or parents). I saw my dad use it only with his father and I only use it for people in my family. The closest analog (though not the same meaning) I can think of for people that don’t understand is from the Princess Bride.
“As you wish”
It could sound cold to someone else, but those that know, it is very warm and endearing.
This would seem to contradict my second post in this thread, but I was defending the more southern habit of using sir and ma’am. Not my own.
And that there is a very good reason not to do it, IMO.
What DO you call a male stranger to indicate the basic level of respect he’s earned simply by not being an arse?
Making such a useful word feel overly familiar seems to be a very bad side effect. Especially when there’s no good replacement for its usual use.
‘Dad’ is perfectly respectful, and ‘sir’ is, IMO, distant - respectful, yes, but not familiar at all. And that, IMO, is how it should be - ‘sir’ is the word used to respectfully address someone you’re not on familiar terms with.
I’ve seen it both ways. My ex-father-in-law is an asshole AND a southerner, and demanded his children call him Sir even into their adulthood. I’ve also seen asshole parents and Southern parents have their children call them Sir or Ma’am.
For me, ‘dad’ is his name. There is no respect there. I use ‘sir’ to show him respect.
If a stranger is not paying attention, I might call out ‘sir’, ‘mister’, or ‘ma’am’. But in conversation, I don’t add anything at the end. It’s just “Thank you.” or “Here you go.”
Many children are raised to use terms of respect for their elders. My parents didn’t teach me the sir/ma’am thing, with us it was Mr. Jones, or Miss Betty. Later I picked up the sir/ma’am thing up from my cousins, and later in life it came in handy when I got my first service job. It’s merely a polite way to refer to an older person, particularly one the kid doesn’t know.
It’s pretty unusual to hear kids call their parents “sir” or “ma’am” around here (Alberta, Canada). So I’d assume that they’re either from somewhere else (e.g. southern US), or unusually old-fashioned, authoritarian, or religious.
I’ve only ever know one family where the kids routinely called the father “sir” (I think the mother was still called “mom”, at least when I was around). They were a loving and caring family, but somewhat more religious and traditional/authoritarian than the average family I’ve known.
You can call someone by his firstname and make it an insult or a caress; you can call someone “sir” and have it come stiff or as a part of a multi-word expression. Answering your parents with “yessir?” isn’t the same as “excuse me, sir, may I have a cookie?” said with a trembling voice - it’s barely on the same planet.
My family, on my parents’ generation, includes people who still address the generation above theirs by the formal usted (the Spanish-from-Spain equivalent of sir/ma’am), people who always used the informal tú, and people who moved from one to the other in their teens. Most of my generation is tú, but we’ll sometimes use usted (on both directions) either as an in-joke or as a sign of extra respect earned (Dad adressed me as “Mrs. Engineer” right after I defended my Project, thus earning the degree and the “Mrs. Engineer”).
Several of my high school friends were children of military or police officers, and when their Dad was on duty/working, they would address him by his work title; if the Commander was in his office at home having a meeting with another officer, it was “sorry to bother you, Commander, but the phone’s for you and it sounds urgent”, not “DADDYYYY! PHONE!”.
When I was in high school we had an American kid at our school for a couple of years while his father was posted to Canberra. The first time he came around my place he started calling my parents “sir” and “ma’am”. I was mortified and thought my parents would think he was a nutcase.
Even worse. They thought that it was charming and pretended that they wanted me and my brothers to start addressing them in that manner. I told Miles to knock it off and use mister and missus, but as far as I recall he never could break the habit. Mind you he probably didn’t really try anyhow, no-one made a big deal about it.
I wouldn’t think the parents were assholes, I’d think they were raising their kids to treat other people with respect and to be polite. That’s something we could do with a lot more of.
You don’t have to raise children to respect people, just not to disrespect them. Given the right example, they are quite capable themselves of determining who merits “respect”. I know, I was one myself. Unquestioning respect is not a trait we should be indoctrinating children with.
I grew up in Baltimore, and my parents expected it of us. I think partly because Dad had been in the Marines. Much as I hated saying it, I now appreciate the clear delineation between children and adults that it conveyed. I’m 56 and few things grate on me more than a kid calling me by my first name. It’s weird enough when my 20-something coworkers do it, but coming from a 6-y/o, it’s just wrong. It’s Mrs. West to you, kid!
I don’t think that’s so much forced respect as emphasizing our different stages in life. Now get off my lawn!
