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When I was younger, I used "ma'am" and "sir" as respectful ways to address people. I still do to this day. Only once did I have a lady get mad at me for referring to her as "ma'am," but it was so automatic that I couldn't exactly stop. Never have I used either term with disrespectful intent.
Using "sir" and "ma'am" was my way of addressing instructors in engineering school, because the faculty was so diverse that I would otherwise butcher their names.
And that’s why everybody gets to be “Dr. B.” to me. There’s no way I can pronounce that foreign name!
The one that got me was being called "that man".
My dad is "Mr. " and he thought of his dad as the same, but both he and I have courted and expected the same title in various places and if you're called that name enough times, you can kind of get used to it.
But when a small child almost runs into you and their mother chastises them with "Careful! You almost ran into that man!" and "that man" is you. Oh boy. And another time "Why does that man look so sad?". As you might imagine, I was not having a particularly good time before that small child said that.
But I suppose it wasn't "that old man"...
Yet.
Exact same feeling when a child almost ran into me and her mom said “watch out for that lady” when I’d have expected to be referred to as “that girl”.
I’m 30 now but the moment still stuck with me as a memory about the transition to adulthood .
I used to object to it because I was just "a guy." It felt so unnatural because I still felt like a just-stopped-being-a-teenager adult. I defended calling women "chicks" for the same reason because, to 22 yo me, "men" and "women" were middle-aged. Fortunately, I learned not to keep doing that.
But yeah, this comic is pretty easy to identify with.
It's funny, sir never held any connotation of age for me. But I've heard ma'am apparently does. Was she expecting another word? Like miss or something?
Yeah there's no age implications for men because it's either sir or sir.
I call every woman I don't know "miss". I've just seen too many of these meltdowns among my friends and girlfriends over the years, I don't want to contribute to harm
Karens get the sarcastic inflected ma'am from me.
She must be cisgender. Trans girls love being called ma'am.
First two panels I thought this was going to be a positive trans moment.