I’m very annoyed by the expression “brown people.” It clearly means people from the subcontinent. There’s no “brown people speak” that includes Bolivians and Guatemalans, is there?
I can just imagine referring to my Latin American students as “brown people.”
No, I can’t. They’d think I have developed sudden dementia. I’d never live it down.
Why can’t Indians and Pakistanis call themselves Indians and Pakistanis? The quoted post will become instantly understandable as a result.
In Russian, the way for a child to address an adult who is not a family member is Aunt Masha and Uncle Tolya. Or whatever the first name is. The Russian-speaking cultures aren’t particularly brown either.
I have no idea what American children are supposed to call adults. Klara’s friends don’t know either, so they call me “Klara’s mom.” I’d be fine with “Mrs B” but it looks like Mrs has gone out of fashion.
“Aunt Masha and Uncle Tolya”
Also in Polish though the first name might not be used and any adult family friends will be referred to as wujek (uncle) and ciocia (aunt) in front of the kids.
” no idea what American children are supposed to call adults”
I don’t think there’s any unifed protocol. I remember using Mr X and Mrs X (or Miss X) about random non-related adults (or first and last name for a few if they weren’t around to hear)
I seem to recall Mr or Mrs with the friend’s first name, so you’d be Mrs Klara but I’m not sure if that’s real or from some fiction source.
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Varies a lot by region and subculture.
I remember addressing friends’ grandparents and older relatives by whatever terms their own grandkids used: MawMaw and PawPaw or Grandma G or Aunt J or even Mama C or whatever, even though they were in no way kin to us.
Not-direct-line relatives who were any generation above ours were aunt and uncle even if they were cousins, adults we weren’t close friends with defaulted to “Mr.” and “Miss” Lastname from the long habit of addressing teachers that way, adults who were close friends with were Mr. and Mrs. (if married) Lastname. And I had a much-adored step-great-grandmother we all addressed as “Aunt” by her own preference: she was not a lot older than my grandma, and she felt it would be presumptuous to assume the title of “mother” with her husband’s adult offspring. So since they called her Aunt, the rest of us did, too. Took me the longest time to figure out how she was related.
Just to confuse things, while we addressed my grandma’s siblings as Aunt and Uncle, when we talked about them they were often Brother (firstname) or Sister (firstname), which was normal when they were young, but had fallen out of fashion for younger generations.
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“Took me the longest time to figure out how she was related”
For kids sometimes function is more important than official position. Both my grandmothers were widows from before my birth. The closest I had to grandfather was Uncle Steve’s father. I have only really good memories of him and he acted very grandfatherly (his wife wasn’t as warm and I thought of her more like an aunt) but I can’t remember what I called him… I mostly heard him called by first name but I’m sure I didn’t use that.
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LOL, my wife straightened out more than one attempt to call her Ms. She was a kind and gentle soul, but when she looked them in the eye, they blinked ;-D
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” If we didn’t know, we defaulted to “Miss””
It’s weird how in English (or at least American) Miss seems more neutral than Mrs. while in other European languages the trend is for the married title to supplant the unmarried one.
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In PE, I defaulted to Senora for ladies who seemed older than me, but was very enthusiastically corrected by the ones who were Senoritas.
-ethyl
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“my parents’ first cousins as “aunt” and “uncle” when we were kids”
There was a cousin I sometimes stayed with in the summer when my mother traveled for work (before I was old enough to go along). She was almost 20 years older than me and I always called her by first name but her husband was ‘Uncle Steve’. I’m not sure if that was my invention or if I was told to do that…
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That sounds about right 🙂 OK to be familiar with a first cousin, but because of the age difference, her spouse is too distant a connection. We did use firstnames with our older first-cousins as well.
-ethyl
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LOL ;-D
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I get the point that he is making but it still seems disingenuous under the circumstances. Maybe he did call her “aunt” but he should know better than to assume that everyone who he wants to impact with the story would know that.
We use Cousin Firstname a lot because aunt/uncle confuse my overly pedantic offspring but I definitely used aunt/uncle for my dad’s cousins. My mom’s cousins were Mr/Mrs. Lastname because we saw them so infrequently.
My friends and I all go by Mrs. Lastname to each others’ kids and the kids at church are learning ;). A few of the other adults in our lives go by Mrs./Miss Firstname but that depends a little bit on how old the kids were when we met them. I figured it was fine to be a trendsetter towards respectful formality. It’s easier to become more informal as they grow than the reverse.
Having an abundant number of grey hairs for my age (thanks for the early grey, Grandma), I actually prefer being called Ma’am but it isn’t the sort of thing that it is worth making any fuss about at all.
-K
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Yeah, there was a time when one didn’t know marital status, you addressed women as Ma’am. And yes, some things actually were a lot better then ;-D
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“you addressed women as Ma’am”
In some places that’s more age than marital status. But the age for ma’aming varies too. In most of the south any adult woman is going to get ma’amed while ma’aming a woman in her mid 20s can be traumatic elsewhere….
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Yes, age mattered, my grandmother and great aunts were Ma’am regardless of marital status. It was all about politeness.
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“brown people”
I hadn’t heard ‘brown people’ before but I’d heard ‘brown’ as a kind of semi-racial identification that means Latin Americans, Middle Easterners and South Asians (and might include those from places like Dagestan if there were enough of them in the US).
Roughly it seems to mean ‘swarthy sort of white non-European’…
I’ve also come across the term Desi for those from South Asia (India, Bangladesh, Sr Lanka etc).
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I think “brown people” is code for global south.
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Both expressions are favorite lib slang.
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Brown people is an old time racial classification. In SA it typically refers to mixed race people and Khoikhoi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_(racial_classification)
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