Asking Bob About Bob

I DISLIKE AMENITIES. There must have been a time when I was civilized, but that time is lost in the distant mists of memory, buried beneath decades of encroaching cynicism. Amenities are of the utmost importance, and, as the late great author Mr. Robert Heinlein pointed out, a sure indication of civilized society. When amenities vanish, so goes civilization, just as clean public restrooms become dirty as civilization declines, as Heinlein pointed out. I still refer to everyone, even children, as "ma'am" and "sir". I say "please", "thank you", and all the rest assiduously, and am assiduously courteous. I have great difficulty calling anyone older than I by his or her first name, preferring "mister" and "missus", even when people, as most people do, object to it, because I was raised that way. Most men seem to resent being referred to as "sir", although the ladies in general do not seem to object to being mammed. Were I to address my extreme elders, few though they are and becoming fewer, by their first names, my mother and father would strike me down from heaven, so I am caught, as it were, 'twixt a rock and a very difficult place. So maybe I shouldn't say that I do not like amenities, but I should say that I often do not ask people how they are, especially the people I see every day. If I see you every day, I am sure as hell not going to ask you how are you today every day. In that sense, I do not like amenities, probably because exchanging inquiries concerning mutual welfare on a daily basis seems to me...superfluous, insincere, shallow. Usually it seems to me that people asking me how I am are merely complying with social etiquette or trying to think of something to say rather than expressing a sincere interest in my well being. Of course, I'm wrong. More precisely, my pet peeve concerns the manner of their asking. During the past few years, it has become, I'm sure you have noticed even if you don't realize it, fashionable, faddish to inquire into people's well being in the third person. So powerful is faddish behavior in America, so imitative are humans generally, that the behavior has swept across the land, or at least across my part of the state, like proverbial wildfire. My name is "Bob". (Hi, my name is Bob! What's your name!?!). Ninety percent of the time nowadays, when someone approaches me and asks how I am, instead of saying "how are you?", he or she says "How's Bob?", speaking to me in the third person as if I weren't there, as if the person were asking someone else about me. It has come to the point where I always respond smart assily. I usually say: "I have no idea. I haven't spoken to him." Often I say "Why don't you ask him?". You wanna talk to me as if I am not present, I'll talk to you as if I aint present. The people who seem to think they are quite clever in inquiring about someone else in the third person never seem to think my third person responses are clever, particularly when, in a particularly clever state of mind, I say something like "I have no idea how Bob is. I never talk to the son of a bitch." People usually rephrase the question, in the second person, peevishly. Well, fuck 'em. Sometimes I explain to people that language is a very limited, inadequate means of communication, fraught with vagueness, inaccuracy, all manner of confusion, but that its the only game in town, and that therefore it is absolutely essential to have rules of language, and to have an agreed upon proper way of using the language, any language. If you're one of these people who doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're", and most people are, or one of these people who uses the word "don't" when one should use the word "doesn't" - and most people are - then you have no business trying to become clever when asking me how I am doing. And indeed there is a direct correlation between people who don't know shit from shinola about proper grammar asking how are you in the clever third person. Inevitably, they are the same people. If "your" one of them, consider this: First, learn the basics, then become clever. And the next time you see me, just ask me how I'm doing, even if you don't care, and leave the "How's Bob" crap in the corner of your clever mind, with all the other linguistic nonsense and ignorance.