Well, we were just talking about how in some parts every single male is a ‘sir’ despite not being knighted. Perhaps the same thing happened with making everyone a ‘you’?
C.S. Lewis makes a similar point In the preface to his book
Mere Christianity . He writes:
The word
gentleman originally meant something recognizable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone a ‘gentleman’ you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not ‘a gentleman’ you were not insulting him but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said - so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully - ‘Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behavior? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?’ They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man ‘a gentleman’ in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is ‘a gentleman’ becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object. (A ‘nice’ meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A
gentleman , once it has been spiritualized and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result,
gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.
This is an eye-opening example from Mr Lewis of how people of goodwill, with the best of intentions, can bring about changes in language that do no one any good. I could wish we had kept to the original sense of the word ‘renegade’. Had the people who now throw it around so casually realized that it originally signified a man who not only renounced his Christian baptism, but then became a Muslim into the bargain, it wouldn’t be heard in modern discourse half as much as it is.
