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| - The way you address someone says a lot about how you think about him or her, and what your relationship is. Just think of the difference between calling someone "Biff" and calling him "Dr. Edmond Von Trapp". This can be a potential minefield, especially when meeting someone new. If someone makes a mistake, it usually takes one of two forms:
* Character A assumes too much familiarity with Character B, only to be corrected, usually in a rather sharp way. "That's Doctor Von Trapp to you!"; Depending on how it's played, this can be used to generate sympathy or contempt for either character: If Character A seemed genuinely rude, then Character B will look better; if Character B seems to have overreacted to a relatively minor slip, then the opposite is true.
* Character A assumes too much formality with Character B, only to be given a gentle alternative: "Please. Doctor Von Trapp is my father. Call me Biff." Almost always used to show that Character B is not as bad/scary as he or she initially seemed. (Though if he is a superior, the subordinate may insist on the formal title to show that no, they are not friends.) Trope is named for Sidney Poitier's famous line from In the Heat of the Night. An educated black detective, Virgil Tibbs is in a bigoted part of the South and ends up first suspected in, then solving, a murder case. Early on, he is asked what people call him where he comes from. (The line was sufficiently iconic to be used as the title for another movie with the Tibbs character a couple of years later.) Referring to a third party without appropriate title can also cause a character to be brought up short. Usually this is also a demand for respect, though it can be a friendly warning that the familiarity might cause trouble. Note that this happens in real life, making it an example of Truth in Television. Compare First-Name Basis, where characters that know each other change form of address to symbolize a change in the relationship. See Honorifics for the East Asian equivalents. Something similar is used in several countries in Latin America, where people refer to themselves by their educational degree, such as licenciado (college graduate), ingeniero (engineering college graduate), maestro (master or teacher, depending on context), or doctor (Ph. D.), and the variant in languages that have formal and informal pronouns - in French, Spanish and Italian, for example, it's rude to call someone you don't know well by the informal "tu". In fact, there is a verb (tutoyer, tutear and dare del tu, respectively), to describe the act of calling somebody by the familiar version of 'you'. This feature, which is called 't-v' distinction, is common to all the major western European languages except English, albeit to varying degrees. It used to exist in English, until 'thou' dropped out of use. Which is why it was sort of rude for Vader to ask his master what "thy bidding" was. For the above reasons, variant A can be a rich seam of Values Dissonance when going from one culture to another. An exchange that makes the overly familiar fellow look like an outright thug in Japan, for instance, can instead make the person insisting on their proper honorific look incredibly arrogant in the U.S. (This can be bypassed by clever dubbing, by having the overly-familiar thug use terms like "Buddy" and "Pal" instead of the person's given name.) This convention becomes more important the older the literary/media source. In American movies made before the sixties, it would be common for working class characters to address middle or upper class characters as "Mr," "Mrs," or "Miss," while middle-class characters would refer to working class characters by their job ("Hey, Porter!"), their last name ("Jeeves, please get the door.") or their first name ("Home, James.") depending on their degree of familiarity, and occasionally their job. (For example, a butler would always be "Jeeves", a valet would be "James", the housekeeper "Mrs. Danvers.") Even older works, such as the writing of Jane Austen, can sound positively stilted to modern ears, with husbands and wives referring to each other as "Mr. Bennet" and "Mrs. Bennet" even in private! The title quote for this trope makes a strong point about the United States before the civil rights movement altered race relationships. In older movies and TV shows, working class or middle-class black people address most whites with the formal "Mr," "Mrs," or "Miss," even if the person addressed is a child or low-status worker. Most whites would refer to any working class black by their first name (the best-known example being Jack Benny and his butler Rochester) rising to the more formal usages only with middle-class professionals like Virgil Tibbs, a college-educated police detective. The difference between Americans in northern and southern states will primarily be that of emphasis. Indeed, in many southern states, failure to follow the rules of address noted could get a black assaulted on the spot or even murdered by local white vigilantes. See also Full-Name Basis and Terms of Endangerment. If this is a Running Gag, then it becomes Insistent Terminology and possibly a Large Ham Title. Contrast The Magnificent, when it's a title or suffix after the name. Examples of They Call Me Mister Tibbs include:
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