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i can't for the life of me figure out whether this thread is about politeness (you know, the markers of social distance) or is some peculiar exercise in self-congratulation. you know, "we" maintain "proper" form while you barbarians....well....i need go no further.
first off, alot of this sort of thing functions as a kind of social dialect marker. i'm from eastern new england. folk here are pretty formal in the context of american english, which doesn't have the pronoun-shifts that other languages do for marking social distance. formality creates a space within which forms of etiquettte operate alongside other types of social codes to enable social interactions to flow smoothly.
i wasn't aware of how intricate these codes are--and of the extent to which etiquette is simple one amongst other codes--until i lived in northern california for a few years. there, neither the linguistic nor other social markers of distance operate. one result is that i continually felt that either (a) my space was being violated or, worse (b) that people were instantly trying to be on intimate terms with me--they acted like they knew me but they didn't. they acted as though i should trust them, but there was no reason for it. this happened over and over until i figured out that i was in something like a different social dialect--bigger than a linguistic one because involving a range of social practices that go beyond "sir" and "m'am"--and that i didn't know how to read the codes.
much of what this thread's about, it seems to me, is complaining from folk who are familiar with one set of social codes that enable distance about their inability to read other social codes. because they can't read them, they assume they don't exist. so everyone but themselves of course appears to be rude.
speaking as a new englander, i don't find people here to be particularly rude. i find that they maintain types of distance. i'm used to it. so you know pretty much how well acquainted you are by these conventions of distance. within that, courtesies are as operative here as anywhere else.
i've always found the elaborate courtesies of southerners to be off-putting because there's something about the elaborateness that makes me feel as though i'm being scammed somehow, or being set up to be scammed. but that's because i am not familiar with the rituals, so i make sense of them in terms particular to my own frames of reference.
and that's all that's happening in this thread.
the only difference between what i've said above and what's happening here is that the possibility that this is nothing more than a regionally specific frame of social reference has been excluded and replaced with some general lament about the decline of Civilization.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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