Oh, interesting. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before but it does immediately make sense.
It’s true about status, though. It works out okay in my current time and place, where I very rarely encounter people whose status is so drastically and publicly different from mine that it would call for significantly different behavior. Or at least, that’s my perception; if I encountered one of your friends on the other side of a cash register, we’d apparently have different ideas about what our relative status was and what level of courtesy was called for. I wonder what leads to that difference.
Oh, interesting. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before but it does immediately make sense.
It’s true about status, though. It works out okay in my current time and place, where I very rarely encounter people whose status is so drastically and publicly different from mine that it would call for significantly different behavior. Or at least, that’s my perception; if I encountered one of your friends on the other side of a cash register, we’d apparently have different ideas about what our relative status was and what level of courtesy was called for. I wonder what leads to that difference.