My Most Excellent Self
Because of the work I do I get lots of emails from folks in the developing world who want help or financial support.
I saw one today from a guy in India who directed his request to me with the opening, "Most Excellent Director."
I get quite a few messages with these kinds of flowery, honorific titles from people in India, Pakistan, and parts of Africa.
Basically, they come from anywhere the English did their imperial thing. The British love of titles combined with indigenous hiearchical forms of address produced this sort of stuff that some people use to this day.
I've decided I like this whole third world honorific deal as a change of pace. "Dude" or simple first names get old from time to time.
So from now on, you can address me as "Your Most Serene and Honorable Excellency" when you're feeling more formal.
Or, if you'd like to be more informal, I'm good with "Your Excellency."
Since this is blogging, I'll understand if you cut it short to YMSAHE.
posted by Wordcat at 10:52 PM
2 Comments:
Your Excellency... ;-)
Last week I spent a lot of hours with HP tech support, now located in India, and came away from the experience thinking...there is NO way they could ever train an American to be so polite and friendly (at 2am nonetheless) in the face of a really annoyed person who's new computer keeps crashing. I was actually glad that I was talking to an Inidan and not an American...all but one of the six people I talked to succeeded in keeping me relatively calm. They even called my back two times, and the longest I ever had to wait on hold was maybe 3 min. I did have a vague sense of disease at the thought that hundreds (?) of young Indians are working the night shift so that I can have the convenience of customer service whenever my rich, American, consumer self wants it...but that is a whole other issue I suppose.
Somehow this IS related to your Most Excellent post...I'm sure of it.
And when you add the beautiful lilting accent to the good manners, it's pretty easy to speak to almost any Indian. I feel exactly the same way.
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