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@taedryn@dice.campDear society: you could just drop "sir" and "ma'am" and other gendered terms from your public service patter. Literally no one would know it wasn't there, and you'd save so much grief in the world.
"Thanks, have a good day!" has the same weight and impact as "Thanks, have a good day, sir!" No one would know. You could make this change right now, and save the sanity of so many people, trans and cis alike.
This toot brought to you by the guy behind the counter who said, "Would you like a bag with that, sir?" and locked in an entire evening of unstoppable grief and mourning that had finally started to calm a little bit.
He was just trying to be polite, and he unknowingly fucked my day, hard.
thinking about it, we don't even specify what should be good
"have a good one"
@taedryn I hear you, my mood tanks every time someone calls me "ma'am" too. Hugs if you want them 
@taedryn I've been working hard to try to drop it. Years of customer service drilled into me to use some sort of honorific, but there's no good gendy noots one.
@taedryn can i replace them with comrade
@taedryn we used to have the mr/mrs/miss as well as the polite form for "you" in our language. Thankfully all of that died out in the 60s or 70s. That stuff drives me nuts when I have to remember it in English/French/German.
@taedryn@dice.camp Last time I got a "sir" and felt brave I said "honey, I am not a knight"
@taedryn have sent two more mails this week to gov entities about them using gendered pronouns in official documentation instead of just neutral ones....
@taedryn i think you're on to something but it's a big shift. That beat in the sentence is the objectifier - the part where it situates the listener relative to the speaker in social space. Terms of endearment go here (baby, darling, my duck), diminutives (lad, kid, boy), insults (idiot, dickhead), salutations (my Lord, Doctor, driver, officer, your honour) and intimaters (friend, buddy, pal). When we don't know someone enough to say friend or want to maintain distance we use sir/madam. /1
@taedryn or the equivalent in other languages.It's quite difficult (try) to think of a way to keep that distance, maintain respect and cordial tone with an alternative objectifier.
A good way to think about it is your addresser is indicating they don't know you well enough to individualise you too much so they address you as a member of your collective.
Maybe one is unneeded, as you suggest? First, it changes the percussive rhythm of the sentence so it feels different, at least as spoken. /2
@taedryn secondly (more importantly) it deprives the listener(s) of a cue as to where the addressee stands relative to the speaker in the speaker's perspective. The subject object relationship loses even its implicit signaling.
I think this is good, subject object communication and thinking its highly problematic, underpins arbitrary identities and leads to misinterpretation but even when understood correctly can cause offence derailing substantive dialogue.
It's just a BIG change
/END
@EvlynMoreau @anilmc @taedryn I agree with you, but what do say when someone accidentally drops something and is walking away? That's the challenging use case, because it feels like I need to address them but how?
I still use "friend" in that case ("Excuse me, friend?") but there aren't great GN options...
@peterbutler @EvlynMoreau @taedryn well identified use case (appellate) but i don't think it's as culturally important as the others because it's a siren to get attention not to convey, so even if you used a rude one ('oi knobhead') if it saved the listener their keys or being hit by a bus they'd in likelihood be OK with it.
i go with 'hey yo' to make everyone look, and if the person who turns isn't the target i start miming (e.g. person with hat, bag, tall person, bespectacled etc).
@anilmc @peterbutler @taedryn yeah but with that exemple you are moving the discussion by creating a new different situation. The original post was about customer service.
@peterbutler @EvlynMoreau @anilmc all the interactions seems to work out anyway here, despite having ditched all honorifics/titles/etc in the 1960s.
to me non-gendered options seem easier, since i don't have to know or ask or guess anything.
@taedryn@dice.camp ironically i did this as a kid as i always hated the word sir. i didn't know why when i was a kid, but had it click a bit after discovering my being trans
@taedryn@dice.camp incidentally, i would choose not to do things likely to make people say, "thank you sir" as a kid. now as an adult, i tend to be spiteful when someone calls me that. guess some things never change
@samsterby @taedryn @25kV It was always love when I worked there. Being from the E. Midlands, I''m used to duck.
@linuxgnome @samsterby @taedryn @25kV "Pal" is used in Ayrshire for all genders
@samsterby @taedryn @25kV
And in Baltimore, Maryland, the gender neutral "hon" (pronounced hun, as in honey.)
@taedryn I have largely dropped honorifics from my vocabulary. But the one spot I'm having a hard time with it is when I need to get someone's attention.
The person at counter starts to walk away, and they left something behind. Just yelling wait often doesn't stop them the same as using sir/ma'am.
There are other words I can use, but the other person has to respond. Still working on this and open to suggestions.
@Phoenix_K_Griffin @taedryn I commented about this use case elsewhere in the thread. That's the hardest one. I use "friend" but I wish there were a better option
@taedryn I always ask public servants do call me by my given name and add a PhD at the end.
I don't have a PhD, I just want to mess with them.
@taedryn can we finally drop that medieval luggage?
@taedryn Never thought I would want to go back to people calling me "hey kid!" and "you little punk", because at least they were gender neutral.
@taedryn
Tired: sir/madam
Wired: citizen
Supercharged: comrade
@taedryn Replace both with "Comrade" and job done.
@taedryn How would you call an unfamiliar person to attract their attention in a street then? For instance, a person lost their wallet, you saw it and you want them to look back. No irony, no offend intended, really interested.
Θ 
@menelion "Excuse me!" "Hey, you!" "You dropped something!" or in that instance, "Is that your wallet?"
@Fingers Isn't "hey, you!" too rude? "Excuse me" would work though.
@taedryn "My Liege" is good enough
@taedryn Approaching two years working retail and I haven’t had to use “sir” or “ma’am” at all; this is totally doable!
@taedryn in all my old retail/service jobs i would say "I can help the next customer" or "person" - it's not that hard
@forestine @taedryn comrade is a good one
@taedryn SERIOUSLY English does NOT require it and any perceived rudeness for leaving it off is vastly less than the rudeness of saying the wrong one. The number of times I have to politely smile at people who sir me at work, or the sales people on the phone who keep calling me sir after I tell them to stop...
I am a big fan of "y'all" honestly.
1. It isn't gendered, it is clearly plural unlike they (which is great too), and everybody knows what it means
2. A lot of times people look at you kind of funny for saying "y'all" because they see it like saying "yous guys" or some other slang that isn't """gramatically correct""" and I really really really REALLY enjoy pissing off people who think there are rules to language like it is physics or something and not a bunch of made up sounds.
@Alonealastalovedalongthe @taedryn This is how I be. Honorifics are baked into my brain, but no matter how often my mamaw rapped my knuckles, I couldn't get out of saying y'all, and to my ear it sounds a lot friendlier, which is what I like to cultivate.
Plus as you pointed out, prescriptivist grammarians are annoying nerds so I like to piss on their shoes.
@taedryn I run into this at work constantly, where I'm using they/them and mostly just asking my co-workers to drop "sir" from their rotation.
"but it's a sign of respect!"
"but I'm from the south, it's habit!"
"but I'm from a military family, it's habit!"
just endlessly tiring