Courtesy expressions that make a difference

Never underestimate the power of “Yes sir.” “Yes ma’am.” “No sir.” “No ma’am.”

I believe they’re a big part of what got me to where I am today.

I believe they’re the reason I was offered the opportunity to train to become a store manager at Giant Foods back when I was a young adult. (I chose the Air Force instead.) The reason I was made a squad leader in military basic training. The reason, even as a one-striper, I was selected to train others of the same rank at my first duty station in Greece. The reason I was selected to be the floor leader over a half dozen others in England, this time with three stripes. And so forth and so on.

Granted, hard work helped, but I wasn’t – still am not – the sharpest tool in the shed. Minus that huge act of courtesy/respect, I’m not so sure things wouldn’t have turned out differently.

I can’t take credit. Left to my own devices, there probably would have been a lot of “yeah” and “uh-huh” and “what” and see “turned out different.” But it was something my mother and father really believed in, so they preached it – demanded it, disciplined me when it was absent – and here I am.

I wonder today if it isn’t a lost art.

That thought came to mind most recently in a series of emails I had with someone about a particular set of concerns. Some things I pointed out that needed fixing to make us better. I wasn’t trying to micromanage. I wasn’t on a power trip. I wasn’t trying to cause problems. It was what it was. It needed to be done. Their responses, however, were evasive and frustrating, each seemingly “politically correct,” polished even – I suspect they might even have been ChatGPT-generated, as they didn’t read like this person’s writing.

It didn’t take long before I was screaming inside: “All I wanted was a ‘yes, sir,’ and we move on. Simple. If it needed to be ‘no, sir’—since I can be wrong—then say so. Not all this ‘here we go round the mulberry bush.’”

I practice this same exercise in futility from time to time with my now-grown children. (Even though I was mindful to teach them the acceptable, sacred response. I guess I should have been like my mom and dad: Popped them upside the head a little more.)

“Yes sir.” “Yes ma’am.” “No sir.” “No ma’am.”

On occasion, it might be fake, using it because you wrote a column about it, and now they think they can use it to get what they want. Or a weapon, someone calling you that in mock politeness to remind you you’re old. (“Very old” in my case.) Or even rarer, inappropriate. “Don’t call me sir. That’s my father.”

But when it’s genuine, it works. It, having its origins dating back to jolly old England in the 1600s, works because it contains a secret – but obvious – element of humanity: Humility. You have to humble yourself to exercise it. A rarity these days. (Especially in the push to be “gender-neutral”.)

In ancient Celtic mythology, there was a belief in certain places called “thin places” where the worlds of the seen and the unseen came closest together.  In each of the beatitudes, Jesus points us to this kind of thin place, a place on earth where we draw closer to heaven. They were also the places He proposed we would find the treasures of the Kingdom of God.

What, at the heart, distinguished them from normal places? Humility, the kind that naturally stems from this honorable, respectful, caring, loving response. Should we sit up and take note?

“Yes sir!”

“Yes ma’am!”