More on Terms of Address

Some afterthoughts, inspired by the comments on “Not Mere Manners”: It's true that all these things are conventional, and conventions change with time and place. What I am concerned with here is conventional signs of respect in address and the decline of any culture where they begin to disappear. There are a number of charming examples in the comments on variations of the theme.

One tries to observe on these matters.  When I am in the South, I use the forms of address employed by polite Southerners--but with caution and only to a degree--for in some cases these might sound mocking or insincere in the mouth of someone with a northern accent. When in Europe, and still a novice in the language, one is as careful as he can be not to use the familiar forms of address where the natives would think it rude, it being better to err on the side of amusing them by addressing one's wife and children formally than to insult the aged professor with a du or tu.

And then there is the practice of addressing God familiarly, upon which a long conversation could be joined. In this there are some paradoxes involved, and I would suggest the custom of pious Jews of not pronouncing the Holy Name at all should be viewed not as overturned but perfected.

My family background is Quaker, and the Friends, of course, traditionally eschew all titles and honorific forms of address. There are two ways to engage this practically, I believe, one of which I believe to be Christian, the other not. The Christian thought is that the public honor due a person is contained in the simple address of his self, so to address him with his own name is to give him whatever honor or lack thereof that name rightly bears. It may be the mark of the highest dignity to be addressed as "Hiram Smith of the Bethel Meeting," (which would equal, semantically, "THE Hiram Smith of the Bethel Meeting") and by the same token the mark Cain to be named as "[The] Jehu Jones of Platteville." Whether this way of thinking was acknowledged among Quakers, I don’t know.  I have seen it practiced among them, believe it to be an inevitability, and would regard its denial as disingenuous.

The unchristian idea is the purely egalitarian notion that all people have something of God in them, so are equal before him in such a way that no one is due any more or less respect than anyone else.  As Christians we are bound to give honor to those to whom honor is due, which includes the honor due everyone as made in the image of God (it is why we should both execute murderers and treat them humanely; it is why we treat unborn children as whole people), and then also of the "office" he or she bears, beginning with “Father” and “Mother.” This is why, I suspect, the various leveling movements in the history of the church have attracted only minorities, and have been very susceptible to heresy. Refusal to recognize the hierarchies placed in the world by its Maker, after his own image, is a recipe for not only theological but cultural disaster.