Is the problem possibly not the use of a pronoun as such, but that the subject of the sentence was not first properly introduced with a noun? I.e., “She lets me take the dog in my room.” would be bad, but “I spoke to mom earlier, and she said that I could take the dog in my room.” would be okay?
Because not establishing context for a pronoun, and letting the speaker figure out what one is referring to, seems like the sort of thing that defenders of “proper speech” like to get upset about, and the step from rule of proper speech to rule of etiquette isn’t very big.
This is the only explanation that makes sense to me. If this is the scene:
<DAD comes into SON’s room and sees dog there.>
DAD: Why do you have the dog in here?
SON: She said I could.
Then son is speaking in a somewhat awkward manner. It wouldn’t strike me as being disrespectful to the mother, but it’s not the clearest way to phrase things. I’ve never heard the “Who’s ‘she’, the cat’s mother?” line, but it isn’t totally clear in context that the “She” in “She said I could” is actually the boy’s mother. That would seem the most likely interpretation of the sentence, but young kids sometimes say unlikely things and older kids are sometimes being intentionally misleading. Maybe “She” wasn’t the mother at all but grandma or a babysitter or something. So I guess I can see why parents would want to correct this kind of thing, although I can’t see getting all upset about it unless the kid is actually trying to be deceitful.
Grew up in Philly, and we definitely had this rule. It applied to all adults, but especially to moms. I didn’t need it to make sense, just understood it to be the convention that said people of respect should not be referred to by shorthand, or first names, or pronouns, because they were worthy of the extra effort of saying their name. Kids, on the other hand, needed to be satisfied with a “Hey, you” from an adult.
I grew up in northwestern Ontario, Canada. It was never strictly enforced in my home, but I have several friends who were “grounded” for “Calling Mother a she” Mom corrected our grammar when necessary, so I suspect my brother and I generally didn’t refer to our parents as pronouns.
I heard it occasionally growing up in California. I don’t remember from whom. It makes sense to inform kids that they should use the correct “proper noun” like “Mom” when first referring to a person. But I’ve also heard this done for the sole purpose of correcting a kid to put them off balance and make them think they’ve done something rude.
Yes, I think this is the crux of the matter. “She let me do it”, when it has not already been established who “she” is, suggests a certain indifference, or indeed lack of respect, for the person. It’s like saying “that woman let me do it”. It fails to acknowledge the significance of the person.
Oh gosh yes. Absolutely. Both parents and my grandparents were very, very big on this, but my grandparents were Polish immigrants and my dad grew up speaking Polish in an ethnic enclave. Mom was just strict.
Adult relatives, especially parents and grandparents, were NOT to be referred to as “he” or she." It was disrespectful.
Grew up in Ohio; never heard of this grammatical “rule” until this moment. On first reference I would expect my sons to refer to my wife as “Mama” or “Mom,” but I’d never rebuke them for otherwise calling her “she.”
I’m amazed at how many of us are familiar with the " ‘She’ is the cat’s mother thing. What a strange saying. Perhaps one day I’ll work out what that’s about.
I used to get the “cat’s mother” line all the time from my grandma - in Australia. So that widens the “regional” nature of the phrase considerably.
Unfortunately, sh…err, my grandmother wasn’t all that great on communicating exactly what the basis of the rule was. I’m fairly sure that it applied to all adult females and, like Stratocaster said, was mostly a “respect” thing (which is interesting, because Australians in general aren’t much into titles of respect)
I never heard any expressions related to the idea, but I was often rebuked for referring to my father or mother in the second person in their presence. So, if I was relating an event to my father involving my mother (and she was in the room at the time), I could not use the word “she” to refer to her.