Southern Conundrums

I am Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, your senior drill instructor. From now on you will speak only when spoken to, and the first and last words out of your filthy sewers will be sir.

I’m still in the seminar and I’m writing this for Saturday’s post. Why not get it out of the way? I’m now surfing mommy blogs because the damn LFA network blocks all the gambling and porn sites. Dooce wrote a post giving her experience(s)/opinion(s) of calling people ma’am and sir. She’s from a conservative Southern Mormon family so that was the only way she was allowed to address elders. I grew up in a house full of hippies in communist Montgomery County so the automatic sir/ma’am was never stressed. I was more than a little bit shocked when we moved to the buckle of the Bible belt and every adult rated the automatic title. What I noticed was that since it was demanded it didn’t mean as much. Respect is earned not given. My first example of this was in my sixth grade class. On one end of the spectrum there was me. I respected Mrs. Greer by not being disruptive in class and allowing her to do her job, but she’d have needed something more vicious than anything I’ve seen on The Tudors if she wanted me to call her ma’am. That’s tied to the rebel gene in my DNA. On the other end of the spectrum were the future convicts and drug addicts who were the exact opposite. They thought nothing of Mrs. Greer or her time, but when they were getting handed their daily referrals “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am” were the order of the day. I’m going to try to play it by ear with LMJ. I know I’ll never make her call me sir. Daddy is just fine. I also know that “WHAT?!?” isn’t going to be an acceptable response when she’s called. She will respect my Athori-tah. I also don’t know what I’m going to do about the Southern familiar Miss or Mister [insert first name of adult]. Sometimes it’s just dumb. What if she needs to refer to ME? We’re doing tongue twisters now?