I was raised to address strangers and those I wish to show social deference to as “Sir” or “Ma’am”. It’s a difficult habit to break, as it is deeply engrained.
What is an equivalent gender neutral honorific that is relatively common in English? If I can’t break the habit I’d rather have a substitute word to use instead of an awkward pause in the middle of addressing someone
I’d just use Google to ask but I’d rather ask the people directly rather than an AI generated answer based off of Reddit threads
ETA: I suppose if Yessir and Yes’m work, Yesn’t could too? Mostly joking… but maybe… 🤔
Homie comes from hommes, which is French for man/men. May also be closely related to hombre, which is man in Spanish. Definitely think it’s risky to use it as a gender neutral term even though it’s just regular slang in English.
This is just made up nonsense.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/homie
Might be a descendant of Latin “homo” (man), but that doesn’t matter a damn, x homie" just isn’t gendered and etymology doesn’t change that.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Wait, that wiktionary explanation seems weird too. I always thought of homie as being a derivative of “homeboy” or “homegirl”. I could be wrong, but I definitely started hearing homie after those two and have always thought that they were connected. In fact, the wiktionary page for homeboy lists homie as a related term, so to me it seems like the two pages are contradicting each other.
“Um ackshually it’s man in Latin!” ☝️🤓
Yeah, okay, thanks for proving my point. Probably shouldn’t be using a word that means “man” in several romance languages if your goal is to be gender neutral.