Just a quirk, my dear

“Love has its woes
— the river flows.
A lover grieves
— the tree grows leaves
Betrayal is fate
— the planets rotate...
From Song of the Ruined Boys by Bachchoo
Except for the very unfamiliar or the very well-brought-up, none of my email correspondents bother to begin a missive with “Dear Farrukh/Mr Dhondy/f/etc”. Some begin by omitting “dear” and using my name or initials, some dispense with all introduction and get straight to their point.

Some don’t bother to sign their correspondence. Perhaps they regard emails not as a form of correspondence but rather as a continuing conversation — after all one doesn’t begin each sentence of conversation with “My Dear Tehmul/Dinaz or Hormuzd (Err — no, I don’t only speak to Parsis, this was just par exemple).
There was a time and place where and when I did pick up the habit of addressing people in a conversation with the prefix “dear”. Arriving with some trepidation from India and knocking on the door of my tutor’s rooms at Cambridge I heard a voice above the languorous notes of a Chopin nocturne he was playing inviting me in.
“I suppose you had better come in, dear boy.”
I didn’t quite understand the form of address but soon found it was quite common among the senior members of the university and even among the more supercilious undergraduates. It was a conceit I thought a trifle outrageous, but one which I, subconsciously, very many years later when some calculation in the back of my brain told me I was old enough to condescend, adopted. Not regularly. I threw in the phrase now and then as a distancing device in an interlocution.
I have, I am told, also cultivated the conversational habit of calling men and women “darling” or “sweetheart”. Until it’s pointed out to me, I don’t notice I am doing it. These endearments have two sources: the first is a variation of the “dear boy” phrase and the second is an adoption of working class pub idiom in which people, mostly female, are addressed as “darlin’” or in the north of England where I spent a year as “me dook” — that being their pronunciation of “duck”. I have never stooped to calling anybody my duck and I strongly protest that when I use the phrases I admit to there is not a hint of campery about them. No one would mistake my “dear boy” or “I tell you, sweetheart” as anything other than sly linguistic punctuation, a pause in the flow while the brain catches up.
There was, though, an embarrassing moment which ensued from this verbal conceit. A lady professor in Germany called me to conduct a seminar with her post-graduate students. It consisted of several sessions with about 15 students and the professor herself who chaired the proceedings. At one point in my discourse she politely interjected and made a scholastic point with which I thought I disagreed.
“I don’t think so, my dear...” I may have said — and there was a sudden hush in the room. The lady professor frowned. I put my views as clearly as I could and she didn’t push hers any further. She seemed determinedly silent.
After the seminar, walking to her office, she was distinctly not effusive. I asked her if that went all right. Yes she replied, except she didn’t think that calling her “my dear” was appropriate and even though she understood it was a trope of my speech understood by the British, her German students would take it as some form of endearment and that was embarrassing. I said I was sorry and would put it right.
So the next day at the seminar I began very consciously, when answering the student’s queries, to address several of them as “my dear” so they would understand that this was more a universal quirk of mine than a particular endearment.
And now just such a phrase has become a matter of public outrage and debate in the UK. Keep in mind that this is the week in which Prince William, the heir but one to the throne gets married, in which the lunatic Islamicists are threatening to disrupt the wedding, the Syrian government is killing its own people and the United Nations is poised for a response from the Europeans and America about how to stop it and a week of not such good news on the economic front.
Parliamentary time and subsequent space in the media were preoccupied with the furore over a phrase. Westminster was debating the National Health Service and plans to reform or change it. Enough substance there to keep a hundred Parliaments engaged for a considerable time. It’s a knotty subject and David Cameron, the Prime Minister, was thumping on about his intentions and evasions at the dispatch box when a Labour member of Parliament, one Angela Eagle interrupted him and began to voice her indignation and contempt for his arguments. She was in a battling mood and wouldn’t let him get away with the point he was making and insisted on the debating procedure, however disruptive and unparliamentary, on which she had embarked.
“Calm down, dear!” was what Mr Cameron shouted back at her, pointing as he characteristically does, with his open right palm.
All hell broke loose. Ms Eagle and several women on the Labour benches protested as Hecuba must have when Achilles dragged her son’s dead body behind his chariot below the walls of Troy. They called Mr Cameron names, taking him to task for his patronisation of women encapsulated, they protested, in the injunction to “calm down” and in the condescending “dear”. The bulls of the world would adopt red rags as their communal flag before the linguistic feminists will tolerate being addressed so.
As a Labour spokesman (oops! I meant “spokeswoman”) Ms Eagle can and no doubt will doubly redouble strokes upon the government’s ill-conceived and even deceptive plans for the National Health Service. As a warrior on the linguistic barricades she will no doubt try and get “dear” banned from parliamentary and perhaps even all other discourse.
Oh dear, oh dear, I suppose it’s time I stopped saying “dear boy”, my dears!