A Swift Kick

The Boy began his first karate class tonight, and I highly suspect it's the only way I'll ever be able to con him into using the honorifics of "sir" and "ma'am."

His mother and I agreed before he was born that I wouldn't hammer the sir and ma'am thing into him like it was hammered into me. Born and (mostly) raised in the South, I was conditioned from the moment I breathed the air of the delivery room to treat every adult with respect. And with that respect came the sirs and ma'ams.

The habit was seriously called into question after my family moved to the Northeast when I was 11. Suddenly, I was in a world where children could say "yeh" and "nah" to their parents and not get a grounding (or worse) for their trouble. Stranger still, in this world the adults did not expect the more respectful form of address. In fact, they resented it. If anything about the move felt like walking into the The Twilight Zone, that did.

For me, the lessons stuck. At 41, I'm still likely to refer to anyone I perceive as older than me by 15 years by the honorific. I'm waiting for that moment when the Boy has a teacher who's younger than me, and I end up responding to him by saying, "yes, sir," only out of habit.

As a compromise between my upbringing and our current location, I have settled with emphasizing the full words "yes" and "no" with my children, if only to preserve some element of - I don't know - basic respect in their language. If you're going to respond to someone and you can't say sir or ma'am, my logic goes, at least you can do them the courtesy of fully pronouncing the words you mean to say.

Now that karate has begun, however, things are going to change. As in most dojos, the Boy's instructor maintains a certain level of discipline with his young charges. At his first lesson today, it seems my offspring was politely reminded on several occasions that "OK" wasn't going to cut it in response to directions.

Whether this will carry over into the home, I can't say, and I seriously doubt it will ever seep into use in school. But if it happens to crop up here and there when he's addressing his grandparents or great-grandfather (all of whom I still reflexively refer to the old fashioned way), I can't say that I'll really be disappointed.