Language and Culture of the Deep South

My two sons are into Japanese art forms, such as Nintendo games and anime. There are substantial translation challenges for linguistic and cultural reasons which are bound up together. 

One of those is Japanese honorifics. Sometimes, rude characters in the Japanese version simply don't use honorifics and in the English version they have a potty mouth because there is no English language equivalent for that. Most of America has no equivalent for Japanese honorifics. 

However, the Deep South defacto has honorifics. I've commented on that a little elsewhere. Hypothetically, Japanese stories could be translated as Southerners to try to incorporate some of that polite culture not found elsewhere in the US.

"Mistress" sometimes gets used in those translations. My understanding is Brits have no problem with that but Americans interpret it like a BDSM reference, which goes weird places if it's intended to be showing respect for a little girl.

I recently was watching a few YouTube clips and one was listing polite-sounding but insulting phrases in the Deep South. I've seen this kind of thing done before but I feel it's often done poorly.

Extremely polite cultures use polite-sounding phrases as passive-aggressive insults or personal attacks to have plausible deniability. It's similar to Japanese people saying "I would never say that about a guest." which is typically a left-handed admission that's exactly what they were thinking but can't say as that's rude.

So when you see some skit where they say "Bless your heart." is calling you a retard, well, only sometimes. If it were never used sincerely, then it becomes a blatant fuck you and there's no more plausible deniability and nothing funny and nothing you really need to explain to clueless outsiders. 

However, it does tend to be true that "Mrs. Jones is my mother-in-law and no one wants to hear that." Unless you are a legal minor, Mrs. Last Name is calling you old and it's being stand-offish and rejecting.

The South is warm, friendly and polite, making it a complex mix of intimate and respectful. This results in calling some people by an honorific plus their given name. 

When I was a child, I called most adults Mr. or Mz. Surname. That means anyone eighteen years of age or over.

Close friends of the family were Tante Given Name if they were German friends of my German mother because Tante is German for aunt. This is a local twist in the German-American subculture where I grew up on the general Southern practice where children call friends of the family Aunt or Uncle Given Name.

When I worked at Aflac, the sole remaining living founder was universally called Mr. Paul by everyone at the company. He was kind of like family or the patriarch of the company, so you call him by his first name to embrace him as someone who is a part of your inner circle if you are his employee but make sure to show your respects. 

No one called him just Paul. Ever.

You also absolutely would not call him Mr. Amos. How dare you. That would be extremely othering, like you've never met the man. Rest assured, if you were employed at Aflac, you met Mr. Paul your first week during orientation. 

While working there, I sometimes got called Miss or Mz. Michele and sometimes just got called Michele. The Miss or Mz. was polite but optional. It would have been rude and offensive to omit the Mr. for Mr. Paul.

These practices are especially common among very religious upper class Southerners. You don't necessarily see this as consistently in the 'burbs where I grew up.

You do see it at, say, church-run private preschools. Then all the kids and teachers get these little honorifics of Mr., Miss or Mz. First Name.

My father sometimes called my nephew, his grandson, Master First Name. Older people get to liberally exercise a right to decide on things like that and may also use affectionate terms like Sweetie. That runs one way only. 

Mz. may have begun as a Southern practice of smooshing Miss and Mrs. together to show your respects without asking rude questions about marital status. If you were social acquaintances but not well acquainted, you need to still provide that honorific without rudely asking about her sex life in effect.

The Deep South is very religious. Miss practically implies virgin and Mrs. practically implies has a sex life. Why would you ask if a gal you just met be fucking someone? What kind of troglodyte are you???

So they didn't ask. When in doubt, just smoosh those two words together. Let her decide if clarification of her marital status is pertinent to her interactions with you. If she volunteers that information, you can update the honorific. If she doesn't, Mz. is perfectly fine. 

Ma'am is not calling you old. If you are an adult female and in the South, ma'am is appropriate for respectful interactions with anyone who may not know your name and also for any situation where you are acknowledging their authority. 

If you're mother or teacher tells you to do something or asks you a question, whether you say yes or no, you append it with ma'am. 

Using ma'am is appropriate behavior for any business transaction, such as salespeople addressing you or you addressing them or speaking with wait staff.

Similarly, you call men sir if you don't know their name. Any adult male you are having polite (business) interactions with is addressed as sir. Just like ma'am above, it also gets used to acknowledge authority.

If a Southern sheriff stops you and calls you boy or son and starts talking about my town or my street such as "Boy, what do you think you're doing flying down my street like that?" it has nothing to do with your age or skin color. He's establishing his authority and you better be calling him sir. A LOT.

Expressions like boy or son are an affectionate means to signal your underling status and it's not necessarily related to your age and it isn't necessarily suggesting you aren't viewed as a man due to skin color. Granted, racism is a big thing in The South, but he's probably calling White people boy or son too.

In some rural southern places, Grandma may be used as a signifier of high social status or respected position unrelated to age. This was used historically for, say, a woman healer in a very rural community who wasn't a licensed physician and she may have been unmarried, childless and not yet 30 years old. And wasn't going to ever marry.

If you see locals call a young woman Grandma Name (first or last), you best assume she is a person of local importance and beloved by the people and behave accordingly or no one will like you.

She's probably not the actual grandmother of the person in question. The actual grandmother may be getting called something like memaw.

The members of the family typically choose an affectionate variation on "grandparent" and it is gender specific. Poppy, grandpapa and other seemingly butchered variants are intentionally created to have unique affectionate identifiers for beloved members of the family deserving of a unique show of love and respect from their inner circle. 

Southern honorifics follow a set of rules that signal mutual respect, position of authority and degree of personal connection. They frequently rely on words that sound like you are related though you aren't. Those words often implicitly carry information about level of authority rather than age per se though it may sound like it's about age to outsiders. 

Family connection is extremely important in the South. Upper class Southern women have long acknowledged both their family of origin and their family by marriage. 

Long before feminists began promoting hyphenated last names, Southern women from important families traditionally changed their middle name to their maiden name and adopted their husband's last name as their last name, a la Hillary Rodham Clinton.