This TikTok account is amusing and may be partly responsible - kindergarten teacher showing how she works, sometimes applying the same methods to adults like her partner or That Man.
Wasn't the user of "friend" as form of address when making a threat a thing in westerns?
I would call that usage the vocative, but I learned it in Latin class and there may be something else it's called when you're talking about English.
2. I agree with Moby. Also, it would be even scarier if a kindergarten teacher said it to me.
I think the canonical form is "Listen, pal. "
Any sort of generic description of a close non-familiar bond becomes threatening in the vocative (I agree with your usage there, LB; the English vocative exists and has weird distinctions from the nominative but they're very subtle). Friend, pal, buddy, mate.
English has too many tenses I'm not aware of.
There also a political usage, especially when the pol is warming up to put one over on the audience. (Almost typed "universe," so, yeah.) I think it's mainly a Republican usage; I can hear GWB saying "Friends, let me tell you somethin' tonight ..."
"Buddy" and "pal" and whatnot are expressions of hostility to acquaintances you are reluctant to call "asshole." In this context, Facebook has popularized the use of "friend."
O dearest Mobes, it's a case.
I guess to the contrary, there is a bartender who used to be at The Independent and is now (well, pre-pandemic) the lead barkeep at Lorelai who calls everyone "friend," but because she's tiny and non-threatening it comes across as charmingly weird. And there's also "comrade," which to the extent that it worked only did so because of ideological commitment. Clearly a translation from a language that doesn't have this feature.
Really curly hair? I wondered where she went.
The big guy at Silky's called everyone "my brother." He's at J. Gough's now.
Anyway, I don't know what a "case" is, grammar-wise.
I think it was just yesterday that I came upon a tweet that went quasi-viral that went something like, "There ought to be a word for a person that you don't have sexual or romantic feelings for, but you like to hang out with sometimes."
"Neighbor" memorably used in this threatening way in Blue Velvet.
11.last: "Act as if nothing is amiss comrade. Get your coat; we are going for a ride,"
16: Huh. I think I finally understand the subtext of Fred Rogers' show.
Speaking of, his old house is for sale. Only $800k.
13: Yeah, her. Do you mean the shaved head guy? He was great.
14: It's a grammatical function of a noun or pronoun, so yes, like tense in verbs. Indo-European languages' case systems can be quite complex, especially older languages, but in English cases are pretty leveled into nothing, except that we have clitics for the possessive/genitive, and in pronouns: nominative (she) vs accusative (her) vs genitive (hers).
I've gone on a jag on twitter that we're at this weird stage where there are words that are gendered in the nominative/accusative (and sometimes the plural) but used in a gender-neutral way in the vocative; this might or might not be sexist, but that doesn't change the variation in gender-neutralness. "A dude" is masculine but "my dude" is gender-neutral.
One of my friends uses 'friend' like this. "Hi, friend", "thanks friend". I too suspect daycare, especially as we both occasionally use "Friend" as a title to designate adult friends that the kids know.
My kids seem to exist in a world mostly without titles for adults. We're really not sure how this happened, but at the university preschool their teachers are "Teacher $foo", and the parents of their classmates are either first names (if well known) or "$foosmama/$foosdaddy". None of us academics use "Mr./Ms./Mrs." much or at all, and we're not making the kids call us "Professor", and being rootless academics that's 95% of our social circle, so this has lead to our kids calling all adults by their first names, except for schoolteachers.
We taught our son to respectfully address unknown adults with "Oi, cunt."
Anyway, I haven't seen Jay in a while because I just learned about his new job, then covid hit.
Building on 22, we have the youngest kids in our friend group, so the precedent was set without us being part of the conversation. The decision was that kids should call the adults of the group Ms. Jennifer or Mr. Justin. I think it's a little weird, but I don't have any better ideas. When I was growing up, my parents' friends were just Jennifer or Justin, and so I just avoided addressing them directly and did a lot of "hey! hey!" when it couldn't be avoided, because I felt uncomfortable with the first name thing. So at least these current kids have a name that they feel comfortable flinging around?
A bunch of them are now high schoolers, and were forced to return to school on Monday, and they stopped by Jammies' room and said, "MR. JAMAAL! MR. JAMAAL! HI!" which was pretty cute.
26: I did the same thing. I couldn't bear to call any of my friends' parents by their names as a teenager. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with it now (for those same parents).
My parent's closest friends were Uncle Firstname, other adults were Mr. and Mrs. Lastname.
26.1 Yes! Your upbringing and mine match that way and also the response, to avoid the adults directly whenever possible. When I moved to the south where there were all these more formal rules for how kids address adults I thought "man, that would have made childhood much less awkward" but really I imagine I would have found a way to be awkward even with clear expectations. But there were parts of the "you're just a smaller adult" way my parents seemed to expect me to interact with their friends that I did not like.
Miss Jennifer and Mr. Justin are just standard expected forms for kids in our town. I guess it's different in Heebieville if that's distinctive to your friends group.
It's a quaker thing, thou ignorant assholes
21.last: I have never heard "my dude" used in any context other than "hey, fellow who just mansplained a thing to me on the internet, I am about to set you straight."
I don't particularly care what people's kids call me (I was raised with Mr. and Mrs. Lastname for friends' parents), but AJ was somewhat stung by friends' children who were taught to call us "Auntie Ydnew" and "Mr. AJ." (They are my friends from college, and we had been together a couple of years when they had their first, but he never received a title promotion as years went by and he continued to be a friendly adult presence.)
21.last: I have never heard "my dude" used in any context other than "hey, fellow who just mansplained a thing to me on the internet, I am about to set you straight."
I don't particularly care what people's kids call me (I was raised with Mr. and Mrs. Lastname for friends' parents), but AJ was somewhat stung by friends' children who were taught to call us "Auntie Ydnew" and "Mr. AJ." (They are my friends from college, and we had been together a couple of years when they had their first, but he never received a title promotion as years went by and he continued to be a friendly adult presence.)
Ugh, finger slipped. Also, I greet our boy cat as "friend." Our last one was "buddy," and I still miss him too much to recycle.
No man ever steps into the same cat twice.
33.first: I've heard it in more contexts, but I only chose it because it's almost unambiguously vocative. The same applies to "dude" or "man"--although the latter started in the vocative, it might be something else now, without any specific referent.
Obviously going down a different path, I think "girl" in the vocative is becoming, if not gender-neutral, approaching it in a complex way.
My daughter went through a phase in which she generally called people, including me, "friend." I am still going through a phase where I call her "Miss E--."
The kids on my side of the family call me "Uncle." The kids on my wife's side of the family call me by my given name. It may be a function of sample size or some other subtle systematic bias, but in my experience, people who use the title are considerably more screwed up than the ones who don't.
Civilians who use military titles make the best chicken.
I usually use "friend" if I am alerting a stranger to something, viz. "Say there friend, looks like you dropped a dollar on the floor" or similar. One of my mother's books about Maine folklore & language had an barroom example: "What did you just say to my chum here, mister man?"
At my Filipina friends' house I'm "Tito Natilo" to my honorary niece there, whereas in my anarchist friends' house I'm just Natilo. Of course, my last name is widely unpronounceable, so I get a lot of "Mr. Natilo" at work from people who don't want to try (or who are so confused by my first name that they think it's my last name). When my father worked for the gubmint, he would answer the phone "[Departmen name], Paennim speaking". Which I wish I could do but they prefer us not to be so brusque.
My dad would answer. "Hick speaking." Nothing else. Home and office.
For a long time I would answer the phone in England as I do in Sweden: "Nworb." And the effect was always I stunned and increasingly awkward silence.
What, no love for "chief"?
How about "Big Hitter"? or "Champ"?
In any case, the effect I aim at is "you, a stranger, have trespassed on my privacy. What is your excuse?"
43: I knew someone who did that but assumed for a long time that it was because he didn't know what language to answer in, since he was a Bulgarian who was Russian-educated became a US citizen and then moved to Germany so there was a roughly 25% chance the next sentence would be in any of Bulgarian, Russian, English or German. At some point after telling that story many times someone pointed out that in a lot of places just using your last name is a normal way to answer the phone. I still like the story though.
My father used to answer the phone with his name and nothing else. I liked that, and did the same until I became uncomfortable with providing that information to a stranger.
This scene from Ocean's Eleven relies on the aggressive undertone of the vocative case, from the top of the thread:
"Watch it, bud"
"who you calling bud, pal?"
"who you calling pal, friend?"
"who you calling friend, jackass?"
46 Have you ever gotten a sandwich at a NYC deli? "You want mustard on that, chief?" The contempt is palpable.
48: When the obvious approach was to opt for Italian. "Pronto!"
I prefer children call me "Ms. J" or "Aunt (in one language or another) J," because it's less awkward for them and I do think the respect of a title is appropriate in this case. I would find it really weird to ask them to call me "Dr." or "Prof." though in other circumstances that is the title I would use. For undergrads I am either "Prof./Dr. Robot" or "Dr. J," and for grad students I invite them to call me by my first name.
37 Some people with Indigenous heritage have strong feelings about that one (based on stories of father's being so addressed). Leave your ten foot pole at home when you come to visit.
My FIL answered the phone with his single syllable last name.
My first office job was with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, Water Resources Division, Water Rights Bureau. Our secretary/receptionist often affected a high ultra-femme (I'm struggling for the right term for this) voice, and would answer with a high sing-songy "Department of Nat'ral Resources." Until, a couple of years in, she heard me answering the phone with a lower, flatter "Water Rights" and she switched over.
As long as we're sort of on the subject: everyone in my other half's family calls their grandparents by their last names: Grandma and Grandpa Smith, Grandma and Grandpa Jones, rather than Grandma Jane and Grandpa John or whatever like normal people. Growing up I knew precisely one kid who did that, and I thought it was the weirdest thing in the world--like a child uttering an adult's name is so taboo that you can't even do it with a Grandma or Grandpa in front of it (though the rule doesn't extend to aunts and uncles, so not precisely that). I still think it's bananas. She takes great offense at my perspective on this, doesn't see anything weird about it at all. I'm right, right?
Despite being pretty old myself, I'm expected to call the couple of octogenarian ladies who have managed not to get gentrified out of our block Miss Firstname. It's adorable but I often slip up and can see the instinctive disapproval flash briefly across their faces (which is also adorable).
56" We generally just called then Grandma and Grandpa (Grandad was our Great-Grandfather), but when they needed to be distinguished it was GrandX Lastname.
Never would their firstnames dare pass our lips.
I only had living grandparents on one side.
One of my grandmothers was super formal, and her kids all called her "Mother". Not of her sons or daughters in law were ever sure if they should stop calling her Mrs. Lastname. But when my older cousins were born, they were living I. New Guinea where grandfather is Gumpy and grandmother is Gummy. So, all the grandchildren called her Gummy as did my Dad and my aunt and uncle through marriage.
We always referred to my father's parents as Bedstefar and Bedstemor, and my mother's as Grammie and Grampie. So no need for last names.
My super pretentious, bitchy New York grandmother decided that she'd like to be called Granny Jennifer when her first grandchild was born. That stuck, and she came to loathe it, but no one told me that she loathed it until many years later. I can't imagine where she got the impression that "Granny" would match her bridge-playing upper East side ways, but for decades I assumed it was a title of great elegance, and didn't totally understand the hillybilly connotations.
26, 54: Also raised with "Mr. Lastname and Mrs. Lastname" which I think is what led to the problem in the university bubble where none of us use those titles. I've tried Mr./Miss Firstname for colleague adults but it doesn't come naturally (especially when the colleagues were known in preschool as Emmasmom or Jacobsdada) so it's been hard to make it stick. The kids have tried out "uncle" and "aunt" for our closer friends. I'm assuming the kids will default to Mr. and Mrs. for the parents of their non-faculty-brat friends eventually. A formal system would be awesome.
I'm pretty sure I never said Sie to my in-laws. And pretty sure my wife's brother's French wife never said Du to them.
I've mentioned before my steadfast decades-long refusal to say Sie to the in-laws' town doctor, whom I only know socially. The only way to avoid scandal was to lapse into English for pronouns and verbs.
I was also raised with bare Grandma and Grandpa in the vocative, Grandma Lastname to disambiguate if I was talking about rather than to them. I sort of knew their first names, but like I knew a piece of trivia about them rather than because I would ever dream of using them.
My paternal grandmother (and my namesake) died 5 years before I was born; and my maternal grandfather died about 10 months before I was born.
That left me two grandparents that I actually knew: my paternal grandfather, whom I called 'Da,' and my maternal grandmother, who was known to all and sundry as 'Nana Dee' (the 'Dee' from 'Delia'). As a child, it would have shocked me very much to refer to my grandparents by their first names; but things change, of course....
I remember once we had one of our more distant cousins over for xmas, and her father (not blood relation) came with, and brought his aunt whom none of us had ever met. My father, who is very good at this type of thing, especially the timing, waited until we were all sort of hanging out waiting for dinner to start, basically just said "So, what do we call you? Mrs. Jurgensen?"* And that turned out to be just how she wanted to be addressed!
*Or whatever her name was. It was some common Scandinavian name (not even sure she was Danish, so maybe an -son?)
Hey friend, what about the vacative case???
Didn't Shakespeare make cock joke that was a pun on vocative? Not googling in case I just made it up.
Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 4, Scene 1?
Certain US government offices answer the phone with the phone number. It's a little odd. But it does tell you that you've reached the number you called (if you hadn't misdialed) and nothing else. One of those you know if you know things. I did think the CIA History office doing it was taking it a bit too far. They're a public-facing group!
Oh, I still call friends parents Mr / Mrs / Ms. And grandparents were never first named.
The Abu / Umm thing is a solution. (Genitive case, Mobes.)
I don't think I used any adults' first names--except for one family who I've known since birth and who were quasi- second parents--until I was in my mid-to-late teens, when a couple of friend's parents started insisting I use their first name. It took me quite a long time to get used to it.
My son, on the other hand, like all the kids locally, either uses the adult's first name, if he knows it, or "X's Dad" or "X's Mum" if he doesn't. All the kids are massively more familiar and friendly or cheeky even* with adults in general than anyone was when I was a kid, and my parents' peer group were mostly pretty easy going people.
There was a phase when I used to take one of our Nigerian neighbours out with xelA a fair bit for day trips, and he started calling me "Uncle Matt" which is much less of a thing here than it was in Scotland. My sister's kids all called her friends "Uncle X" or "Auntie Y", often using their nickname. So it'd be "Uncle Whitey" or "Uncle Bins" or whatever.
* I'm fully used to xelA's friends insulting me to my face, or whacking me. In a good natured way, I mean, as they would their own parents.
I never use, or expect to have it used, my title in spoken communication. I do use it in written correspondence, though, and my work email signature has "Dr nattarGcM".
That's an entirely conscious choice to avoid being patronised or disrespected by my clients, though, who are often academics, senior librarians, or museum curators. That kind of disrespect is absolutely a thing. If I don't drop my title somewhere in correspondence, or make an oblique reference to my academic background in meetings, someone inevitably will treat me like some troglodyte who lives in a bedsit full of pizza boxes, dog-eared manga, and Star Trek memorabilia* and who doesn't know the first thing about the academic domain in which we are working.**
* not that there's anything wrong with any of those things.
** whereas the truth is, they (academic/curator) might be doing a project like this for the first time, whereas I'm on my 20th go-round.
I never use, or expect to have it used, my title in spoken communication. I do use it in written correspondence, though, and my work email signature has "Dr nattarGcM".
That's an entirely conscious choice to avoid being patronised or disrespected by my clients, though, who are often academics, senior librarians, or museum curators. That kind of disrespect is absolutely a thing. If I don't drop my title somewhere in correspondence, or make an oblique reference to my academic background in meetings, someone inevitably will treat me like some troglodyte who lives in a bedsit full of pizza boxes, dog-eared manga, and Star Trek memorabilia* and who doesn't know the first thing about the academic domain in which we are working.**
* not that there's anything wrong with any of those things.
** whereas the truth is, they (academic/curator) might be doing a project like this for the first time, whereas I'm on my 20th go-round.
I never use, or expect to have it used, my title in spoken communication. I do use it in written correspondence, though, and my work email signature has "Dr nattarGcM".
That's an entirely conscious choice to avoid being patronised or disrespected by my clients, though, who are often academics, senior librarians, or museum curators. That kind of disrespect is absolutely a thing. If I don't drop my title somewhere in correspondence, or make an oblique reference to my academic background in meetings, someone inevitably will treat me like some troglodyte who lives in a bedsit full of pizza boxes, dog-eared manga, and Star Trek memorabilia* and who doesn't know the first thing about the academic domain in which we are working.**
* not that there's anything wrong with any of those things.
** whereas the truth is, they (academic/curator) might be doing a project like this for the first time, whereas I'm on my 20th go-round.
Argh. I swear I didn't triple post that comment. Button glitch.
My paternal grandparents were Grandpa and Grandma, my maternal grandfather died before I was born and my maternal grandmother was Nana.
An old family friend, his father grew up with mine on the same street in Bensonhurst and have been life-long best friends, always called his parents by their first names. It felt very weird but somehow became natural.
My grandparents were Big Gran and Big Grandad, and Wee Gran and Wee Grandad. I'll leave the question of which was Glaswegian and which was English as an exercise for the reader.
How we as children addressed four of my grandparents was conventional - two were Grandpa and Grandma, two others the same plus first names - but the other two were Bampa and Nana, which I think may have been conceived as a bit of an affectation but may have also been from that grandmother's Welsh heritage.
Grandma and Granddad on both sides, but my great-grandparents (paternal-paternal up the tree), who lived into my early teens, were "Granddaddy Joe" and "Grandma Lorraine".
That stopped when I stopped wearing a hat with a buckle.
paternal gps: Granny, Grampa.
maternal GPS (significantly younger): Mormon, Morfar until I was about 13, thereafter Anna, Arthur.
Mormon sb Mormor. Raised Lutheran, attended Anglican Church once a year.
I was about to ask. I know they have missions everywhere, but I thought it was rare in your island.
Anna was Danish. I suspect the missionaries would have had a hard time in Copenhagen in the middle of WWI.
Explaining why you can't drink beer or coffee to a Dane can't be easy regardless.
Er, I dunno: I guess I don't exactly love the "hail fellow well met" vibe of "Friend." Would never, ever want to be addressed as such by anyone other than a close, intimate friend (who would never, ever address me as such if we were actually close, intimate friends ...).
88: Yes, many of my cousins have a Mormor. The male diminutive is a lot less common, at least among 4th generation Danish immigrant ELCA*-leaning communities.
*Except for the beer and coffee thing, those Wisconsin Synod types are practically Mormons anyway.
Beer and coffee are two of my favorite things.
93: How are you holding up in Ontario?
96: BG, we are basically on fire with COVID infections in Ontario at the moment, and with no responsible government in charge, and with no end in sight. Turns out, electing a dumbass anti-govt government was a really bad strategy for dealing with a global pandemic: who knew?!
Can we call upon the feds? No, because of Canadian federalism. Can we call upon HM QEII, Queen of Canada? No again, because of Canadian federalism. We are on our own, and we are well and truly f*cked.
||
So, you guys might be wondering what kind of crazy shit the Montana legislature is up to. Last month, they got rid of the commission that vets applicants for judicial positions, to make it easier for the governor to appoint right wingers. (The commission applied the sort of standards of professionalism that lead conservatives to claim bias). Some people sued to invalidate the new law (including a friend of mine who was a delegate to the 1972 constitutional convention). The judges association had opposed the bill, and so the legislature has been trying to get the judge's emails with each other about this bill and others. They sent a subpoena to the department of administration, and the Gov's appointee (newly arrived from Georgia) turned over a bunch of emails without giving judges a chance to redact. Shit hit fan, and the Supreme Court enjoined further compliance with the subpoena. Leg leadership responded with 'you're not the boss of us, you goddam liberal pinkos' and subpoenaed all of the Supreme Court justices to individually appear before legislative hearings, and bring their documents. So today, the Supreme Court said, no, under the principles of Marbury/Madison, which we've adopted, we say what the law is. Everything is enjoined, and here's a briefing schedule.
I predict a May ruling against the legislature with opinion to follow, and then an opinion after the legislative session is over.
|>
98: That's really interesting! My layman's guess would be to side, legally, with the legislators. Can the the legislature not set the law for how judges behave? Absent some over-riding principle -- say, something in the Montana constitution -- what is the case in favor of the Supreme Court's ruling? Does Marbury really say that the courts can do whatever the fuck they want, regardless of the legislature?
It says that a legislative enactment that is contrary to the constitution is void, and that it's the judiciary's job to say whether that is so.
In that case, whether judge's emails are subject to subpoena, whether privileges might exist, is a separation of powers issue, and, as a legal question, gets decided by the judiciary.
On the underlying question whether this particular statute eliminating the judicial nominating is constitutional, I haven't looked at the arguments. At first blush, it doesn't appear to me that the commission is constitutionally mandated, but (a) it was created right after the constitution was adopted and (b) delegates to the convention this this new law is unconstitutional.
This is all over the news, but I'm also watching because I have a case in front of a judge appointed by then lame-duck Gov. Bullock, after having gone through the commission, who is awaiting senate confirmation. If the commission continues, there's no point in denying him confirmation. If instead, the gov gets to appoint the wildest right winger, well, that's what they're trying to do.
In my current working environment there are people (people who outrank me, as almost everyone does) who expect to be addressed as "Marneus" or whatever their first name is and get very amused when I use something more formal like "Brother Captain", and other people who expect me to use "Brother Captain" or "My Lord Librarian" in every communication and get rather offended when I call them "Marneus" by mistake, or just say "good morning" rather than "good morning Brother Captain" and I am having a hell of a time remembering which is which.
98: whoa, that's quite a shit show.
97: Stay safe! I am worried about Tim's mom. She got Pfizer 1 a week ago, and she wasn't going out anyway, but she sold her house and is due to move to Ottawa. Plan is to put stuff in storage and rent because the housing market is so hot, but I'm thinking she'll just wind up at his brother's place for a while... but no 2nd shot until August.