Interesting Links for 03-06-2014
- 23 Words That Have A Totally Different Meaning In Scotland
(tags: Scotland language funny ) - Edinburgh trams ‘worth 400 year wait’
(tags: Edinburgh trams ) - Smokers with gene defect have one in four chance of developing lung cancer
Which I think means that those without it have a 10% chance. Anyone care to check my maths?
(tags: cancer genetics ( Read more... )
I had an interesting conversation with a friend of my mom's, L, about a person roughly my age (20s-30s) who's just gotten married and not changed her name. L told me that this person was frustrated at people addressing her as Mrs. Husbandsname (or addressing them as a couple as Mr. & Mrs. Husbandsname, with no mention of her names anywhere!). L understood the frustration intellectually but she said in practice it was very difficult for her to not address a married woman as Mrs. Husbandsname; it went against everything she'd been taught about being polite and respectful.
As far as I can tell (though I may be misrepresenting this as it's foreign to me), L and my mom and their generation were led to believe that there are hard and fast rules about what is and what isn't polite, and that these rules apply to everyone. Respect or offense can therefore be implied and inferred solely from manners.
And so they find it hard to extract the intention from the act. I tried to help L separate her good intention -- to be respectful -- from the thing she'd customarily do to show that respect. It was a big leap for her: clearly until quite recently she had no need for a distinction between a desire to show respect and an action that went along with it. And she could be confident that the respect would universally be understood and appreciated as such because everybody she was likely to interact with knew the same rules she did. But now, suddenly the polite act would not necessarily be taken as it was intended.
I think it must seem very weird, to have these rules that have served you well most of your sixty-some years on the planet subverted by a subsequent generation who emphasize the importance of context and personal preference. It can look like swapping a bedrock foundation of certainty for a vague, nebulous world where you have to work out everything afresh for each new person you interact with. My mom and her friends are fundamentally nice people; they don't enjoy going against someone's explicit wishes, but the bone-deep indoctrination and decades-long habit of "good manners" is going to cause some distress, some cognitive dissonance, if they defy it, especially if they feel they have to leave their bedrock and move to constantly shifting sands.
This kind of cognitive dissonance is going to happen with any culture-clash, of course, but I think it's especially profound when it's to do with politeness and manners. Because manners exist to keep us from having to think too much about how we interact with people, as the point of them is to offer a pre-ordained way to deal with pretty much anything. They allow us to tell ourselves "well, I don't know why Mrs. Husbandsname was so upset, I was doing my best! I was trying, wasn't I? I only want to be nice!" We can avoid as much responsibility for the effects of our behavior as we like, safe in the knowledge that we can blame the vague authority of manners which, being bigger than any one of us, knows better than we do what's good for us.
So I can't say it baffles me. I don't like it, but I do understand it. And I'm grateful it only took me a year after I got married for my mom and my grandma to stop calling me Mrs. Hickey.
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Thank you.
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I really enjoyed writing this comment and all the thinking I had to do to get it written, so thanks for giving me the impetus to do that.
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Although it's now been in popular usage since the 1950s, you'd think that they'd have had time to adjust...
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