Lisa Belkin, a blogger for the New York Times, has a post on changing trends in forms of address:
Yet my children call all my friends by their first names. Only one couple in our circle teaches their kids to use “Mr.” and “Mrs.,” and they tend to call my husband “Dr. Belkin,” even though that is not his last name, and me “Mrs. Belkin” even though that is my mother.
This is part of the reason for the new informality, of course. Families have gotten far more complicated over the decades; knowing a child’s last name doesn’t necessarily mean that you know what to call his or her parents. Add to that the cultural baggage loaded on “Miss,” “Mrs.” and “Ms.” Whichever you use, you run the chance of insulting someone (especially if she turns out to go by “Dr.”).
Solution? Don’t take yourself so seriously that you’ll actually be offended if someone happens to pick the wrong title when addressing you respectfully. I can’t tell you how many times my husband has been mistakenly referred to as “Mr. Hill” at the grocery store, and while I confess it can be a little annoying for people to mistakenly assume something about your identity, it’s ridiculous to wring one’s hands about the “cultural baggage” of it all. Better to say “Miss” when you mean “Mrs.” — as so many grade school students do — than to take the liberty of assuming a much closer relationship with someone than you actually have.
According to Belkin, young people seem to be making a return to the formality of days of yore, a trend she suggests might actually be troubling:
But lately I have been noticing that my 14 year old and his friends call each other by their last names. Sometimes, for reasons known only to them, they add –y at the end, as in Smithy or Jonesy, but most of the time they stick to Smith or Jones.
This became the stuff of spirited conversation over Thanksgiving at my house this year. I figured it was a “boy thing.” Having never been one myself, I don’t have a great sense of what boys have always done and will probably always do. My brother-in-law, who works at an inner-city charter school, says he didn’t do it when he was a boy, and sees this as a form of intimidation — it is not, he says, an acceptable way for peers to speak to peers. Could be. But it could also be as simple as kids doing something they have rarely heard a parent do — addressing a friend by last name.
How perplexing it is that Belkin should spend the first half of her post talking about how different kids these days are yet proceed to use her, presumably, full grown brother-in-law’s opinion to explain the behavior of her own children. Might I, as somewhat of a youngster myself, suggest that perhaps the kids have started calling each other by their last names in an effort to mimic the British schoolchildren in the Harry Potter series? Or perhaps they just like the sporty feel of calling a chum by his or her last name. Or maybe, as is characteristic of teens and tweens, they haven’t put as much thought into it as their parents have put into overanalyzing it.
Am I the last person on Earth who finds it more insulting to call a stranger or distant acquaintance by their first name than to make an effort to address someone with a degree of respect and formality, but choose an incorrect title or name?
Like so many other things, this seems to be tied up to a certain extent with identity politics and a breakdown in the 1960s of the divide between the private and public spheres: On the one side are those who want to stick to traditional forms of address and maintain a certain distance from others in public; on the other are those for whom their titles transcend mere signifiers of respect and instead carry their own political messages and those who wish to address the whole world as though it is their good friend. I’ll have more to say about the public/private divide in forthcoming posts, but for the time being suffice to say that I would much rather a stranger mistakenly call me by my husband’s last name than take the liberty of using my first name.
