What is a gender neutral honorific for non-binary folk?

Scotland approves 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

FWIW, Sir is not gender neutral in Gamestop.

Sir is gender neutral in fictional militaries. Every woman holding a commission I ever encountered was ma'am. Didn't matter the country.

Sir hasn’t been gender neutral in my military for like 30 years at least

Not sure what military you served in, but the one I served in definitely didn’t call women sir until instructed otherwise. However, “mister” may be correct for all warrant officers.

Not really...

Like, yeah, probably in Star Trek, but that would have been a projected evolution of modern society, not a reflection of current reality.

Everyone would assume "sir" and if it's over an email no one is getting worked up about it.

But call a female officer "sir" to her face and I don't think it will go well

No, I got yelled at when I didn't see.

Are you sure you're not Spez?

I've seen enough posts related to etymology or historical use of words where they, either misrepresent the facts to fit a narrative or just make shit up, that I try to look it up my self. I also find etymology fascinating so that helps.

In this case they are absolutely right.

Both Mr and. Mrs,ms are derived from master and mistress (teachers) and both of those words stem from the Latin word Magister.

Edit: fun fact the English verb stick is the same word as the noun stick and comes from the same origin the Germanic word stik which also meant a piece of wood and to pierce/adhere or sharp. But wait it's older than that the Latin word stigare also means pierce. And share the same ancestry, namely indo-european. Turns out we humans have been talking about sticks for a long time.

...why not just "magister" and avoid a word that already has very strong, current connotations with fantasy?

...crap, I'm cis male and I wanna be addressed as "mage"...

I am legit going to use Magister as a replacement option for Mr/Mrs. It's formal, archaic, and gender neutral. That's the trifecta right there

Also if you have to hand someone off to another colleague, I find you can just use "we", and it still feels polite. At least compared to calling them "the customer" (clumsy) or "they" (weird, when they're right next to you). 😃

"So, we're looking for [product], and we need it to be [thing]. Oh, and we have a budget of £25."

I just stopped using pronouns altogether.

“Excuse me” “Thank you” “I appreciate you” “Do you know the way to San Jose”

ALL of these have pronouns. At least one of them has multiple pronouns! Haha

'San' is gendered /s

You is a pronoun btw, just it's only used in specific contexts

I can't not address a person, that's incredibly rude.

I also like this interpretation. It's the same gender neutral connotation as the Cali surfer "dude" or "bro" used equally with everyone.

Yeah I think "sir" trumps madam because it's professional

This one bugs me a bit. I’m sure it’s said with good intentions, but I have a client who calls everyone on my team “friend” whether or not she knows us, and it always rubs me the wrong way. We’re not friends, she’s the client in a professional setting, and she has never shown any interest in getting to know me enough to actually call me “friend” and have it mean something, so it always comes across as superficial and unnaturally folksy.

As someone who doesn’t have a ton of deep friendships, the ones I do have matter a lot to me, which means I don’t like to throw around the word “friend” lightly.

Could just be my own emotional hangups though.

Friend-o. And carry a coin.

You're amazing and so are your questions.

I'm looking for a third option for sir/ma'am, and a substitute for Chief that's a bit more formal.

The culture I'm in now is not as formal, this isn't so much finding something to work within the culture of this area as it is to marry my culture to the one I find myself in. I have very little to connect me to my people here and so the traditions I choose to keep are more important as a result. I like saying sir/ma'am. It's the verbal equivalent of holding the door open for someone. But for some people being addressed that way is invalidating, and I want to meet people where they are, not force them to come to me.

I like Magister as a third option for Mr/Mrs., and Professor as a more formal Chief. But sir/ma'am has me stumped

Clearly we need to start adopting Japanese honorifics that way we can just call people -san.

I often call people chief. One time I started to say Yessir, realized midway the person I was taking to might not appreciate the label, tried to change lanes and say Yeah, Chief, and wound up saying Yes Chef.

We had a really good conversation about The Bear TV series afterwards

Hat tipping intensifies

Yesn't, I can do that

I thought 'it' was a third person pronoun.

Got any of that good sarsaparilla?

You here lookin for the Sundance Kid too?

But what if they are an MMA fighter?

I work in 911 dispatch, understandably once in a while I get a caller who is just absolutely losing their mind over whatever is going on that they're calling about

And sometimes pretty much the only thing I can do to grab my callers attention and bring them back around to listening to me is to just kind of repeat sir/ma'am until I get their attention they come back around to realizing I'm trying to talk to them.

If I can get their name, I use that instead and it's more effective, but that's not always a given.

Just sitting there in silence until they get their shit together on their own doesn't work, and more likely they're going to just hang up on me.

And repeating whatever question I need answered really just kind of goes in one ear and out the other while they continue going off.

Their name or sir/ma'am is punchier, it has a way of cutting through their panic and grabbing their attention saying "you are being addressed right now and the person addressing you needs your attention"

And I really wish we had a good, gender-neutral equivalent of that. It needs to be polite and professional, and maybe a bit authoritative-sounding, so something like "dude" obviously won't cut it.

And I need it both for trans/non-binary people, and people whose gender just isn't clear on the phone because they're in a panic, calling from a potato, and/or just have a somewhat ambiguous voice.

Normally I just have to pick one and go with it, and they'll either correct me (in some cases, choosing the wrong one might actually be more effective at grabbing their attention because astonishingly (/s) people don't enjoy being misgendered and they jump at the opportunity to correct that) or they also just roll with it.

But I'd really like to avoid that if I can, and I haven't really found a good option for it yet.

Honorifics are part of my culture and tradition. I've let go of a lot of other things from my culture that interfere with loving my neighbor, but there's certain social mores I don't want to abandon. Honorifics are a way of showing respect to others in my culture, it is as ingrained as taking off one's hat and standing for a funeral procession.

Korean is easier, just call everyone Teacher. Problem solved.

Check their question again. It's pretty ingrained in some dialects

Sup, bozo?

Came here to say this, or "cap"

That's not strictly a scifi thing, it was a prevailing real-world military custom for a long time to address all military superiors as "sir" regardless of gender. These days the thinking varies, and as women have been integrating into the military for many generations now in more and more places women officers may be addressed as "ma'am."

Homie comes from hommes, which is French for man/men. May also be closely related to hombre, which is man in Spanish. Definitely think it's risky to use it as a gender neutral term even though it's just regular slang in English.

If a person who knows me calls me “sir” I ask them to not call me sir. I loathe being called sir lol.

Yeah, in Scandinavia you just say "you" or use a person's name when referring to somebody else. Or their job title if it fits the context. You can really feel that you're not "below" anybody, we all deserve the same level of respect and the language reflects that. Additionally, you don't need to guess anybody's gender if you're not sure, avoids uncomfortable situations.

I can't hear friend without thinking. im not your friend ....

Found Obama

I'm not your friend, buddy!

Don't like forced closeness as a neutral greeting, comes across to me as either manipulative or meaningless.

It works for person's of middle eastern cultural descent for sure, but it's fairly casual for a native English speaker from Appalachia

Dude is absolutely gender neutral, didn't you learn anything from Good Burger?

I think technically it's "bru", possibly "bruh"

I feel like I might get a call from HR if I use those.

two yutes.

Pittsburg is similar. Yens

Nice to see the Scouse dialect get a mention! But sadly I have to inform you that we nicked that particular one from the Irish.

I often say 'man' as an affectation regardless of gender, but today I accidentally said "thanks man" to an obvious trans woman at the kitchen store and felt really bad but she pretended not to notice.

Some people who aren't men have a negative reaction to being addressed as "dude" or "guy" nowadays. There's been a lot of writing about it online by women and non-binary folks, and some people in my life IRL have expressed that feeling as well.

"Guy" and "dude" had been all-encompassing gender-neutral terms in my head for ages (I grew up in the 1980s-1990s when we were all dudes) but I've been making an effort to switch away from using them that way because I like my speech patterns to be kind by default.

M'dude.

Sounds like something a food truck vendor selling spicy shawarmas would say.

Sounds like something a villain's goon would say.

“Mx” can work

Writing it is one thing, but how are you supposed to pronounce it? It can't possibly be "mix;" that'd be like pronouncing "Mr." as "murr" instead of "mister."

But that won't fuel the internet discourse™!

Killing is wrong. And bad. There should be a new, stronger word for killing. Like badwrong, or badong. Yes, killing is badong. From this moment, I will stand for the opposite of killing: gnodab.

In writing it works, in person, not so much.

Kinda like saying most churches are more interested in profits than prophets. It takes very precise pronunciation to deliver that one verbally lol

Auncles

Certainly not late for dinner. Or at least that's what they tell me

What about Sport?

How exactly are u pronouncing that? Like Mx = "em-ex"?