Tom Sawyer's adventures…
…captivated me as a kid. I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a dozen times, every time getting absorbed in the details of life in the 19th century. But I had questions. Not just the obvious ones about words I knew we weren't supposed to say, but questions about how Tom spoke to the adults around him.
Take this passage from early in the book as an example. Aunt Polly is sure that she has caught Tom doing something he shouldn't have been:
"Tom, it was middling warm in school, warn't it?"
"Yes'm."
"Powerful warm, warn't it?"
"Yes'm."
"Didn't you want to go in a-swimming, Tom?"
A few lines later, Polly's question changes and Tom responds with "No'm." I could figure out warn't1 and a-swimming. They were similar to other books I had read. But, yes'm and no'm? What was Tom saying? Was he calling Aunt Polly, mom? Was this some old-fashioned, strange form of mom, like how in the U.K. people would say mum?
The answer, I was told, is that Tom was saying yes ma'am and no ma'am. Which made perfect sense because, when I was a kid, I thought ma’am was a word for someone else’s mom. You know, like you’d be at your friend’s house and their mom would ask you a question and you’d say yes ma’am because she’s not your mom but she’s a mom, and so, since Aunt Polly is not really Tom's mom but acts like Tom's mom then he's calling her by this word for not-my-mom and that’s how that works, right? Not quite.
The history of ma’am is fairly straightforward. It arrived in English from the French madame and attained its abbreviated form sometime in the 1600s. Since then, it has been defined by its referent, meaning a married woman, a member of the royalty, or simply a woman one wishes to address respectfully.
But ma'am is a loaded term. For those of us of a certain age2, growing up we were told to use it address a woman we didn't know. It was proper, correct behavior at school, at part-time jobs, sometimes even at home. But times change.
These days, ma'am is a gendered term that assumes a woman's marital status and, possibly, socio-economic class. More importantly, though, is that being called ma'am can be taken as a comment on a woman's apparent age. Writing in The New York Times, Natalie Angier says:
For many women, then, the insertion of the word “ma’am” into an otherwise pleasant social exchange can feel like a tiny jab, an unnecessary station-break to comment on one’s appearance: Hello, middle-aged- to elderly-looking woman, how may I help you this evening?
Sheri Levy, writing in Psychology Today, has similar thoughts on the matter:
Ma’am, not Madam, is ironically used as a put-down. Ma'am suggests older (when it is actually not about age by definition). In our current youth-centered society, "older" is not the polite and respectful reference it once was.
That's not the only problem. Janelle Davis, writing on CNN.com notes:
The main way (sociologist Kelly Elizabeth) Wright sees the word used by younger people – in person and on TikTok – is in a comedic, ironic manner. In these cases, it’s tossed at people to put them in their place and reset the conversation.
The message is clear, ma'am is no longer a good way to address someone. Which, on a personal level, is absolutely no problem. On a professional level, however, it's becoming something of a big one.
English as a Second Language textbooks are having a hard time figuring out what to do with ma'am (and sir, but less so). While society as been re-evaluating ma'am - the specific examples of women disliking the term in the articles linked above go all the way back to a 1970 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show - textbooks have more-or-less stuck to sir and ma'am as the polite ways to address people.
The question becomes, what can we use instead of ma'am? Thesaurus.com gives this list, which I find generally amusing:
madame, Frau, dame, madonna, signora, Mrs., marm, and señora
Right. Moving on. Other dictionaries and thesauruses suggest everything from simply using names to other titles to terms like friend and neighbor, none of them address the most common use case given for ma'am in my textbooks:
A woman drops her scarf on the train.
Another passenger says, "Excuse me, ma'am. I think you dropped this."
It's tempting to replace ma'am in the above scenario with meme-worthy text like fellow passenger, or traveller3. Simpler to just omit the term entirely. And, in fact, that is what updates to the textbooks are suggesting. Rather than find a new word, the publishers are re-working scene dialog to avoid using ma'am. And that works just fine, yes sir.
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain
What else could it have been this week? But, seriously, if you haven’t read the book, or haven’t read it recently, you could do far worse for a summer read. There are some dated ideas and of course there are the language issues, but it is also the novel that defined American literature for the first time. It’s also the novel that held up a picture of American boyhood to contrast against Dickens’ urchins and waifs. In other words, it holds up well and you’d be doing yourself a favor by reading it again.
To this day, warn’t is my favorite way to quickly irritate grammar enthusiasts.
My age. People my age. Which is getting older every freaking day.
There’s a lot more to be said about how to address people in modern times; non-binary and non-gendered forms of address are an ongoing issue in language teaching and there are no clear cut answers just yet. I suspect there may not ever be.
As a non-native speaker, I was never properly taught how to use "ma'am" but, for some reason, I've come to see it as a way to address an adult woman but only from a kid's point of view. I think the moment you become even an adolescent, this indeed sounds like a stab at how old the person looks.
Interesting to think how it evolved like this while "sir" instead has kept its positive image.