Some 35 years ago, when I was in my late 20s, I was out with my dad somewhere and a waiter or clerk of some sort answered my request with “yes, sir.”
Simple politeness, no more.
I reacted with the extreme discomfort common to my generation.
“Oh, no, I’m not a sir!” I assured the staff member who’d so addressed me.
Later, when we were ought of earshot, my dad — who came of age in the 1950s — shared that the first time someone had called him “sir” had been in his early 20s, and that the experience had filled him with a little pride as it had made him feel he was coming into adulthood.
The difference between his reaction and mine is that, at least in North America and parts of Western Europe, adulthood is a condition that in many ways went out of style during the counterculture movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s.
All through my young adulthood in the 1980s, most of my friends and I, if addressed as “sir,” would laugh nervously and say, “Oh, is my father here?” or, if ex-military enlisted, “Don’t call me ‘sir’ — I work for a living!”
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