Sir/Ma'am and Surnames

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

"Kimberly Davison" wrote:

<< Here, everyone (well, most everyone) says "Yes, Sir", or "Yes, 
Ma'am" to their elders, whether it's parents, teachers, or in the 
case of a salesperson speaking to a customer. It has never been 
considered an upper class type thing here... Well, not in my neck of 
the woods, that is. :-) >>

I suspect you're a Southerner (unless you live on a military base). 
Children saying "sir" and "ma'am" to adults and adults saying "sir" 
and "ma'am" to strangers with whom they're conversing is said to be 
a Southern custom; there are even country music songs praising the 
South because "we say sir and we say ma'am". I listen to ATC radio 
news&opinion show, where the newsreaders often converse by phone 
with people on the site of a news event, such as a local sheriff 
in an area that was damaged by severe tornadoes or a military Public 
Information Officer, and I've noticed the Southern and military 
personnel saying "sir" and "ma'am" in every other sentence.

Melody wrote:

<< I didn't know that either. To me, ma'am and sir are almost 
compulsive speech and meant in deep respect. >>

And in the same post you mention that you're a Texan, which to me is 
a kind of Southerner. Am I allowed to say "Reb"?

<< Hmm, now I feel a little bad about having Sneaky always speak so 
"American." She is, after all, a British house elf. Sorry Pip. >>

I don't think you did anything wrong with Sneaky. Part of their 
servile dialect in the canon is that they keep saying "sir" and 
"miss". 

Pip!Squeak wrote:

<< In modern Britain, it's commonly used in the military for juniors 
speaking to seniors, used by salespeople who have to call customers 
something other than 'er, whatever-your-name-is', and used if you 
bump into royalty, whom you must call 'sir' and 'ma'am'. It's 
certainly used much, much less than in America. >>

That's basically how it's used here in California, and how I 
recollect it was when I lived in New York City  (except I have faith 
in the ability of Americans to come up with a great diversity of ways 
in which to address royalty).

Pip!Squeak wrote:

<< Kids would generally refer to their friends by their first name, 
but might pick up the habit of calling people they don't know so well 
by the surnames they hear so often. Calling a fellow pupil by their 
surname is also a way of emphasising 'you are *not* my friend'. >>

In the 19th century, kids (I only read about boys, but my friend 
said it was girls, too) at school (at least at high-class schools) 
ONLY referred to each other by surname. Kipling shows siblings being 
distinguished by number rather than first name (Dickson Major, 
Dickson Minor, Dickson Tertius, Dickson Quartus) and I read somewhere 
of children invited to spend the holidays with school friends, where 
they had to embarrassedly ask the servants for their friend's first 
name, which they had never heard before but was not very distinctive 
at the friend's family's home.

Melody wrote:

<< Ok, this is my Texas (the sport-crazy masculine state) viewpoint, 
but here the boys *are* called by their last name and the girls by 
their first. >>

You're right, of course, about surnames being a jock thing: when I 
went to university, I discovered that girl jocks call each other and 
their girl friends by last name, same as boy jocks.

Other that than, there has been a widespread tendency in USA for most 
of the twentieth century to refer to men by surname and women by 
first name (such as when they are characters in books, or when 
speaking of one's friends in the third person) and I believe that 
PART of the reason for that is that men all have the same few given 
names, but women have a wider variety of given names.