I disagree. Etiquette is what certain people of a certain class said to do many years ago in a world that bears no relation to ours. Much of what they considered etiquette we would deem hate speech.
I believe in manners, but not in etiquette. They do overlap in particular instances but on the whole etiquette is almost always better avoided.
I also find it weird to hear “Mr. Obama,” partly because, during the campaign, he was always referred to as “Senator Obama.” I spent November, December, and most of January in giddy anticipation of hearing the phrase “President Obama,” so it’s a little weird to hear the news anchors call him “Mr. Obama.” I spent most of November 5th working “President-Elect Obama” into conversation as much as possible, so I want everyone to call him “President Obama” now.
It makes me hope that our next president’s last name is “Dude.”
The exception is in formal circumstances, where the whole issue of ‘what to do’ is, by and large, avoided by arbitrary conventions to allow the people who have work to do to get on with it. This has the added effect of being a crisis preventative: We’re spared some of the high school nonsense of who sat with who at the big state dinner by making seating arrangements part of a giant formal game played by strict rules, giving everyone one less thing to fight about. Because wars result from tiffs between diplomats, this is a good thing.
Kimstu: The State Department is obviously relating the rules played by diplomats and others in formal, official capacities. It’s so far from the public eye even newspapers, who are anal about these things because they want to maintain good relationships with newsmakers, don’t follow them. As for what I said about rules, I was making a general statement about the English language, which has shown a remarkable versatility and usefulness despite all of the official rules imposed upon it so far. I do thank you for digging up that cite, for until now I thought ‘The Honorable’ was purely a British or Commonwealth style.
I agree, but I was referring to ordinary people in ordinary circumstances.
What are you talking about? Etiquette is “please” and “thank you”. Among other things.
Ed
The trouble is that you can’t avoid it. Since etiquette encompasses a vast set of arbitrary but widely recognized conventions about interacting with other people, pretty much anything you do to interact with other people is either following an etiquette convention or violating one.
And when you violate one, it’s usually difficult for other people to know whether you’re doing it out of ignorance, out of contempt for etiquette rules in general, or out of contempt for the particular individual(s) you’re interacting with. If you ignore etiquette rules that are conventionally interpreted to show respect for other people, then unless you go around all the time wearing a sign that says “It’s nothing personal, I just don’t believe in etiquette”, other people are apt to be insulted.
No problem, and yup, “The Honorable” is firmly established in American etiquette. Some more examples:
Nope. Them’s are manners. This is etiquette.
I think you’re trying to impose an artificial distinction that’s just as silly as the rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition. You’re trying to argue that everyday etiquette conventions like saying “please” and “thank you” somehow don’t count as etiquette. According to you, everyday conventions are “manners”, while “etiquette” is just the snooty snobby stuff like whether it’s correct to have machine-made lace on the fingerbowl doilies.
But this attempted distinction is ridiculous. Of course saying “please” and “thank you” is part of the conventions of etiquette. To deny that is to ignore the accepted standards of usage that you, as a fervent descriptivist, supposedly respect so much. As these examples indicate:
I know several doctors, professors, military officers and judges who would disagree.
I disagree. The concept of the proper etiquette in this situation, specifically, is extremely important when we talk about the principles of the Republic and our intentions in founding a new government. Specifically, that we call our commander in chief and executive officer “Mr. President”. Think about it. Mr. President. That’s it. It’s important - it’s a really big deal, and it was at the time too. John Adams took up more than a month of the Senate’s time trying to argue about it.
The first president I remember the news media calling Mr. was Mr Nixon. And it was usually when reporting on Watergate, black friday, or the war. It was not a title of respect. It is a way of deniing him the respect of is office while appearing to be respectful.
The use of Mr. has different meanings depending on the conditions. Think about it. When I wanted to get my son’s attention it was “Mr! stop”. If your boss calls you mister it is usually not good.
When I worked for Macy’s the department head would encourage the engineers to call by his first name. When the crew talked about him they refered to him by his last name or first only. I always refered to him as "Mr. **** or when talking to him I only used Mr. ****. One of the apprentices knew that I has zero respect for him and asked one day why did I always included the Mr. The first assistant picked up on it and explained it was a show of complete contempt. The 1st was ex Navy.
In my life time the pres that were often called Mr. were Mr. Nixon, Mr. Clinton, and Mr, Bush (W). May be after 16 years the newsmedia has forgoten. I did not like it I lmay have been a McCane suporter by This president has done nothing to earn our disrespect.
If most people wouldn’t know about it without being shown a specialized reference like the State Department protocol manual (and most people aren’t aware that it exists in the first place), then it’s not “widely recognized.” It’s a specialized set of rules for particular circumstances.
You keep saying that calling someone “the Honorable” is an obscure diplomatic thing. It isn’t.
Most dictionaries have a section in back listing the proper forms of address for government officials, religious figures (like ministers and popes and so on) and others. Calling someone “the Honorable” is about as specialized as knowing that when writing a letter, you put your return address at the top, the date a bit below that, the addressee’s name and address below that, and so on.
So if you want to have a broad meaning of “specialized,” as in, it is a specialized skill to know how to write a standard letter, then maybe you have a point. If you mean “specialized” in terms of a rule of American English that only applies to a small number of uptight ninnies, then that isn’t quite right, since reference works sold to the general public have included this information for a very, very long time.
Indeed. It’s kind of funny how people get all worked up about how they think they should be addressed.
Firstname Lastname has served me well.
If a purported cultural norm has to be looked it up in a reference book in order to know about it, then it’s obscure. Actual societal norms are learned without reference to specialized sources. My mother and my kindergarten teacher taught me to address elders and strangers as “Mr.” or “Ms.” That’s a general cultural norm. They never said anything about addressing officeholders as “Honorable.” And I am guessing that of all the letters and messages received by members of Congress and other such people, a substantial proportion of them dispense with the “Hon.” When the general population doesn’t follow the rule, it’s not a rule.
I never considered dictionaries to be repositories of specialized knowledge.
I’ll remember that next time I have the temptation to criticize someone for talking about how the Steelers are going to “loose” the Super Bowl, for example.
As I pointed out above, this is simply not true. It is the standard for every newspaper to refer to the president as Mr. in every article and it has been true for over a century. (And maybe longer. I just found fewer newspapers to search earlier.)
It is not a sign of disrespect. It is the acknowledgment that the president is not a king.
Exactly.
But Snnipe 70E also has a (less clearly expressed) point about using conventionally correct honorifics to indicate contempt, in a subtle way.
When your boss asks you to call him by his first name, and instead you call him “asshat”, you’re expressing contempt for him by being rude. But when your boss asks you to call him by his first name, and instead you call him “Mr. Lastname”, you’re expressing contempt for him by being formal.
The use of “Mr.” in that case symbolizes, “I do not consider you deserving of the informal friendliness represented by the use of first names, and I intend to keep you at arm’s length when interacting with you.”
However, that doesn’t mean that the use of the honorific “Mr.” is generally a sign of disrespect, and it is certainly not true that newspapers use it in order to insult presidents that they don’t like.
I apologize for continuing the hijack but I can’t let this go. I’m a student at a (tiny, weird) college. All classes are a seminar-style format (no lectures, no classes with more than 20 students). In class, everyone is addressed as Mr. or Miss/Mrs. Lastname. This allows there to be a certain formality to class discussions, but also allows there to be mutual respect between students and professors. The professor who has two BAs, a Master’s and a Ph.D is addressed the exact same way as the fresh-out-of-high school frosh. The dean or the president of the school? Mr. Soandso.
It makes a bit more sense in the context of the academic program at the school* - it’s a “great books” program, professors at some point teach all classes regardless of their academic background, and the heart of the theory is that everyone learns from the books and each other - but the point is, it’s absolutely a sign of respect for everyone.
Anyway, my point is, it’s absolutely not the case that addressing someone who has a ‘higher’ title as “Mr. Whoever” is necessarily an insult; the universality of that can be seen as something respectful itself.
*If you’re interested, here is a propaganda video that explains the address issue about halfway through.
Not everything in a dictionary is a cultural norm. Some of it is specialized knowledge.
Looking to a dictionary for the definitions or spelling of words and looking to a dictionary for a cultural norm are two different things.
At some point, “loose” may very well become acceptable. Dictionaries follow custom; they don’t set it. Entries in a dictionary do not supersede actual observed behavior.