英语美文：Dear Sir or Madam

Travellers to Francophone and Hispanophone countries will have noticed a superiority of everyday social interactions to those observable in our own country. They retain a slightly formulaic ceremoniousness that is now entirely¹ lacking from our own culture, and that comes (at least to me) as a great relief. If there's one thing that ought to be avoided in casual, everyday encounters, it's saying the first thing that comes into your head.

I attribute the superiority in part to their continued use of the terms Monsieur and Madame and Se?or and Se?ora. It is not affectation, but a deeply ingrained habit. You don't go into a shop in France without saying "Bonjour, monsieur" or "Bonjour, madame".

The other day, I was crossing the street in Paris reading a book, as is my slightly hazardous² wont³, when a man on a bicycle nearly ran me down. "Attention, monsieur! Attention, monsieur!" he cried, not forgetting his manners even in his irritation⁴. I shouted an appropriate apology after him, rather gratified and reassured⁵ by the whole episode.

Goodness knows what an English cyclist would have shouted in the circumstance: almost certainly something unprintable in a respectable journal.

For some reason we in England can no longer use Sir and Madam in an unstilted way. The last time I called an adult Sir was in addressing a coroner while explaining how a patient came to hang himself. As for Madam, I used it only when angry, for example after a woman launched into me with reflections upon my character when I had inadvertently and unknowingly stood in her way for a few moments. "You have a tongue in your head, Madam, have you not, and could have asked me to move?" In my mouth, then, Madam is a term of abuse.

Why can we not use Sir and Madam? It obviously has something to do with our ideological⁶ revulsion against any taint⁷ of hierarchy⁸. So in large parts of the country, I am most commonly addressed by spotty young men as "mate". This aggressively levelling and proletarianising mode of address has spread very rapidly. The trouble is that objecting to it (which I have on occasion done) sounds pompous⁹ and priggish, in the same way that objecting to obscenity always appears prudish¹⁰ and narrow-minded. There seems to be a Gresham's Law of etiquette¹¹: the coarse drives out the refined. The Bolsheviks knew this very well, and welcomed it.

I should like to start a society for the restoration of Sir and Madam in everyday speech. Unfortunately, all the causes I espouse¹² are lost.

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