altoids0

Yeah I'm not really starkly in favour of a removal or anything, just pitching that as my opinion :)

That said, I think it's super possible to provide good service to people without honorifics! Making people feel respected is more than just saying a specific word a bunch of times, like maybe you're getting a positive result out of customers just because saying those honorifics put you into the frame of mind of being nice to them and taking them seriously.

IMO it's entirely possible to talk super fancy with a dozen "sir"s or whatever and be intensely rude (look up British MPs insulting each other as a potential example). Conversely I think it's possible to be extremely hospitable with rustic, informal language. Singular particles are not really the end of language, it's the greater action and meaning that matter way more.

While I don't think there is an obvious drop-in replacement yet, I'm sure some consensus will eventually happen (as has been forming for the use of "Mx./Mixes" for the Mr/Ms dichotomy).

Honestly though? I think honorifics are not a strictly necessary part of language. Like day-to-day I usually do...

1. For getting the attention of a person you don't know the name of, consider "excuse me" or "pardon" in formal/service contexts and "hey!" or "hello!" in more informal ones
2. For speaking to someone authoritatively (i.e. "Ma'am, you are now charged with..." or "Sir, you will have to leave the Wendy's") you can just omit the honorific entirely and replace it with some other polite particle (like "Sorry," or "I'm afraid that...")
3. For speaking to someone who has authority over you ("Sir, with all due respect...") you could address them by the title that confers that authority, or simply omit any honorifics and address them in a more peer-to-peer fashion.

Ultimately honorifics fill a more antiquated role of recognizing and placing yourself in a hierarchy, either below or above the other person, and maybe that's not a good thing. For example, using them often is a lot of the (perhaps unnecessary) emotional labour of service jobs. So if we're altering our language then perhaps just shifting away from them is the correct way forward. That's just my opinion though :)

One thing I love about this specific allegory is how it conveys a hunch held in the back of my mind (and probably other transfem people) that masculinity is sort of a defective category for anybody; being an unwavering war machine without thought is not anything to aspire towards, so why even measure any bot by their capacity for violence?

Friends with (health) benefits

Are there any other undocumented features of my abdominal cavity that I should be aware of

(Being pedantic here) A couple US states technically use proportional representation in the apportionment of electors in a presidential election (Nebraska and Maine), although it's of course dubious if an elector actually counts as a representative, given how ephemeral they are.

so you're saying the theory remains undisproven? woa... O_o

An ice ball the size of Jupiter dotted with small little flat earths would have a surface gravity of at least 19m/s², about double the measured gravity of Earth. The real value would likely be higher, as surface ice compresses the ice below it.

Otherwise a very based theory, can't think of anything else wrong with it

Yuri fans reinventing homestuck auspisticism