the conventions of politeness

my child has a bad habit of never saying "please." it's not that she doesn't ask nicely otherwise, it's just that the word "please" is never included without prompting. this has been bugging the hell out of me of late. in some sense, she comes by it honestly, because danish has no word for please. there are nice ways of asking for things, but no one word that just means "please." mostly, danish uses a kind of distancing technique to ease the blow of what's being asked for. "would you be so friendly as to let me off the bus" (not that anyone would ever say that particular phrase, they just fidget at your side until you get the hell out of their way.) "pray, hand me the remote," "i would like to ask for a cheeseburger." "are you so sweet as to get me another martini?" and the like.  but "please" as a word and even as a concept is curiously absent.

and naturally, this got me thinking about other linguistic politenesses. like "bless you" when someone sneezes. i remember my mom saying when i was a kid that "bless you" was a holdover from a time when people thought you sneezed out your soul, so you needed to be blessed for it go back into place after a sneeze. mom thought that was quite a ridiculous notion, as our souls could not possibly leave our bodies in that way. so we didn't say "bless you" in our family. as a result, i always felt rather awkward when someone blessed me when i sneezed - i never really knew how to react. do you say "thank you," or express some sort of relief that you still have your soul? i never really knew. let's face it, no one really believes that you're sneezing out your soul, it's today a matter of simple linguistic convention/politeness. so really, why is it that we feel a need to acknowledge when someone sneezes? we don't do it when they burp or fart. aren't bodily functions in general best left uncommented?

another politeness convention that i don't get is the notion of telling someone hello through another person. this is one that there is a word for in danish - at hilse. when signing off a phone conversation or parting from a friend, they will often say, "hils familien" - "tell your family hello." and like with "bless you," i never really know what to do with that. i end up mumbling some awkward, "please tell YOUR family hello." but really, why on earth should they do that? if i want to greet them, i'll do that myself. and if they want to greet my people, they can do it themselves. plus, there's the whole fact that i don't do it. i don't pass along their greetings. it's too awkward and frankly, my family doesn't mind. they think nothing of not being helloed by whoever i talked to on the phone that day.

what weird linguistic conventions of politeness puzzle you?

thinking about language

i just read a really interesting piece in the new york times on language. it's from the magazine, so it's a long, deep article (yes, there ARE still some bright spots on the american media landscape).  it discusses gender in various languages and also how different languages express concepts like time (chinese doesn't have verb tenses, for example, so everything happens in the infinitive) and space (an aboriginal language that expresses all directions using north-south-east-west) and a really interesting study on the correlation between how color is expressed in certain languages and how it affects ability to see the color spectrum) i won't recount all of it here, but encourage you to go and read it.

but reading it was well-timed, as i was just telling husband that i just couldn't get used to the way that danish refers to animals as "it," and doesn't use she/he pronouns for them. so, when i'm talking to someone, say the vet or the horseshoer, they refer to our matilde as "it." and it never ceases to be a rather jarring experience for me, because our matilde is a girl and should be called "she" when we refer to her using a pronoun. i feel it as cold and heartless. but interestingly, in danish, to refer to a person as she or he in their presence, rather than using their name, is considered rude. whereas that's perfectly polite in english. i wonder what matilde makes of being called "it?"