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Ma'am y'all


Southern honorics are a thing.They don't get called honorics in the south but that's de facto what they are. 

Close family friends are frequently called Aunt or Uncle (plus their first name) by the children and in my family close German friends of my mother's were called Tante plus their first name. It's German for Aunt.

In Asian cultures and languages, honorifics are common and this can be a translation challenge. If you have a rude character in Asian fiction who fails to use honorifics, they sometimes translate that as someone with a potty mouth because there's no cultural equivalent in English.

There's also Mr. or Mz. (first name). When I worked at Aflac, the last living founder was called Mr. Paul by everyone in the company.

It's both respectful and familiar which is an artifact of southern culture not found in most of America. Southerners are warm friendly people. And also have respect and formality in a way not found elsewhere in the US.

I once heard from a credible source that Mz. didn't begin as a feminist thing. Instead, it started in The Deep South as an artifact of Southern manners because it's rude to inquire about the marital status of someone you barely know and it's rude to to call them the wrong thing, similar to Japanese small talk about western astrology, so they just created a word that sort of smooshed the two words together and gave the honorific without requiring that information.

Supposedly, feminists picked up on it later, presumably as a means to object to marital status being a primary identity for women.

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