The 'vos' and the loss of respect

"These papers here will be yours..." a colleague from the high school told me the other day in the staff room. I suddenly understood that "yours" meant all the colleagues in the department, not just me. Today I went to buy the checkout, which is the only place we usually interact with someone from the department store, and a girl said to me, very nicely, "Would you like a bag, sir?" It's become clear to me now that perhaps the colleague from the other day was referring exclusively to me...

These are the inevitable consequences of getting older and showing it in the lack of hair, the white beard, the undeniable abdominal prominence... These are the inevitable consequences. First, because despite the passage of time, we're still here, in good health, and ready to fight wherever necessary. And secondly, because it confirms that among young people (at least those younger than our generation) the use of 'vos' when addressing someone older or a stranger still persists.

Let's talk. In Mallorca, the use of 'vos' in the past wasn't strictly directed at old people, but rather at those older than the speaker who was also married. The Alcover-Moll dictionary states: "Get married and they'll call you 'tú,'" which emphasizes that "in Mallorca it was common to address single people as 'tú' and married people as 'tú.'" I've heard it said in our family. My godmother would warn my mother and her siblings that "so-and-so is getting married now and you should address them as 'usted,'" even if the age difference between those four single siblings and that distant relative was insignificant.

Of course, it was also common to address strangers formally, those we met when visiting other towns, or those from outside the area who came to shop here, for example.

In my own case, I always saw my mother address our godparents formally. And I have always addressed all my friends and aunts formally, without hesitation. I have also addressed the parents of people my age here, though with more hesitation.

Over time, this respectful and formal address lost its force. The formal "usted" became associated, thanks to (or because of) this archaizing process, with older people. We've all been told at some point, "Don't call me 'usted,' we're not that old," as if that form of address had to be exclusive to the elderly.

The fact is that, from a certain point on, neither godparents nor godmothers allowed their grandchildren to address them in this way. And today, just like that, as if it were nothing, everyone is a modern, young, impoverished 'you,' perhaps even defiant. It's gotten to the point where today's youth are incapable of writing a fifteen-line piece of writing to a second person (using 'tú') without switching from 'tú' to 'usted' and then back to 'tú' a handful of times (it must also be said that in Spanish, theyou It has also fallen out of favor, especially among young people.

And now we sometimes see young people on social media using it. streamers They approach strangers on the street, shouting "you!" to construction foremen, university professors, wealthy men considering their careers, or grumpy taxi drivers.

It's unclear if it's the years, but it's back again, jarring and slightly unnerving. And no, we're not here to defend respectful treatment based on class. We should be truly grateful if we've managed to shed the classist, submissive, servile, and overly Spanish "usted" that, in the last vestiges of Mallorca's class-based system, we reserved for gentlemen, priests, doctors, and schoolteachers.

Reducing treatment to the simple 'you' stems, in one way or another, from the elevation we have given to children and young people, placing them on a level comparable to adults. As we grow (and we are always growing), we need role models (even idols, if you will), people we can respect and admire, people from whom we can always learn because they have lived longer and have more experience.

Children cannot have the same level of authority as the adults who accompany them in their growth, precisely because the evolution of humanity has been based on the transmission of knowledge, experience, and values ​​from generation to generation. And then, once adults, progress, change, research, and new experiences have arisen from known experience and passed-down traditions, allowing us to modify and correct the errors we have inherited.

May the gods protect us from ever having to be afraid again. But beware: today many children and young people have no regard whatsoever when addressing an adult, as if respect were an outdated attitude, something static that doesn't help new generations, as they say nowadays, "to become empowered."