Christian name or Mr/Mrs/Miss?

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Does anybody else find it condescending when they're addressed by their Christian names? I think it's a terrible and totally phony trend which robs people of their right to be respected in the name of ridiculous and contrived informality. I don't want the whole world to be my friend; I want to deal with competent, intelligent professionals with a sense of decorum.

I recently deposited some money in a local bank branch and was addressed by the teller with my Christian name; I put in a complaint. Even when I've introduced myself as Mr. [Surname], people still sometimes refer to me by my Christian name. I never shop at those places again.

Is it just me, or do others feel this way? I know older people sometimes complain about this trend, but I've never come across another person under the age of forty or so who feels like this. I think this has to do with what Christopher Lasch called the "Erosion of competence".

I'm happy with people using my first name. I'm not particularly keen on formality.

I don't like customer service people addressing me by my name at all unless they need to call on me. i.e I'm in the waiting area and my appointment slot comes up and they need to get my attention.

It's so fake. My friends don't need to throw my name into the conversation when they talk to me. Why do customer service people need to? I can go whole conversations with friends and we never need to use each other's names.

Yet to create a false sense of commaraderie the customer service person has a target to use my name 3 times in conversation. When I worked in a call centre I got pulled up constantly for not using people's names. Tough. I'm not doing it. It's fake.

If they do need to call on me I really don't mind if it's my first name or surname. Though they do tend to use both my first name and surname together so I know its me and not some other Miss Smith.

I wouldn't complain about it though. That's just petty.

I like to be called "mister" so-and-so....but I don't mind being called by my first name, either.

I don't understand the cultural kow-tow whereby people insist on calling it a "first name" rather than a Christian name. It has nothing to do with religion; I'm an atheist and actively dislike most organised religion, and yet I still use the latter term.

I've noticed that every time I'm waiting in a group for my name to be called, I'm the only person who is summoned with both names. The person will call "Isabella Linton ... " (for example) .... whereas everyone else gets either Christian name or surname but not both. I've taken notice of this my whole life and I literally strain to hear anyone else addressed with both names, but it seldom happens. It's become a running joke, although it's annoying.

I don't know if it's because my names go nicely together, or they're easy to pronounce, or whatever ... but it bothers me quite a bit and I find it to be an invasion of my privacy having both names announced in public like that.

If it is a one-on-one professional setting I prefer my honorific.

I prefer forenames. Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms seems rather cold and stiff, I prefer a society in which we're all reasonably warm and familiar to each other, I don't like this formal corporate distance thing very much. It's perhaps a little harder to crap on each other if we keep underscoring the fact that we're all human beings. It also avoids the need to say "Ms" which I don't like using because it feels like one of these contrived politically-correct things. I wasn't too keen on any addition to the Mr/Mrs/Miss thing in the first place, but if they had to change it then I'd have preferred them to just add one to denote a married man. I don't like married people trying to hide the fact that they're married, you see. Actually most married women like being called Mrs anyway so the Ms thing didn't really work. Sometimes I add Mr. or Master to the front of a (male) person's name when I speak to them, as a kind of ironic joke. If it's a friend then it's meant as a very gentle bit of teasing, if not then I might do it as a mild pejorative or an attempt to distance myself from their views. I'm a strange guy, I'm often sarcastic in an oddly genial and friendly kind of way.

I don't like the new description "given name" that replaced "Christian name" either, but I can see the logic behind it so I've stopped opposing it. "Christian" smacks of a totalitarian attitude towards Christianity, which I guess is why they switched it to "forename." I was happy with that after a bit of thought, but then they switched it to "given name," and I felt rather annoyed about that, because I wanted them to stop messing about with it, but I thought about it for a while and soon realised that some people have their surname at the beginning of their full name, so I had to concede it was a logical and fair change to make. The whole subject is one in which my logic isn't quite in tune with my feelings, so I'd rather not use terms such as "Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms" and "Christian name/forename/given name."

ToughDiamond:

There's nothing corporate about the honorific, and the Christian name doesn't highlight our humanity in the least. It actually makes it easier to deceive/exploit people, because it allows the powerful and socially able to manipulate the gullible into believing they have a friend in someone who wants to get one over on them, especially in a corporate situation.

Even if this weren't so, addressing an adult the way one would a child is just indicative of a lack of respect. One can't be friends with the whole world, even if he wants to be (and I, for one, don't); the most one can rightly ask of a stranger is that he show one RESPECT; this is the reason, anthropologically and psychologically speaking, for the emergence of the honorific as a piece of social etiquette. It has nothing to do with power, the way Marxists would make out; everybody was expected, until about fifty years ago, to address a stranger who had passed the age of majority with an honorific unless instructed to do otherwise, even if that stranger was of lower station.

As for the authoritarianism of the Christian name, this is another piece of political correctness gone mad; everybody knows that it has nothing to do with religion.

I prefer "first name."

There are some people who aren't Christians......

I'm used to being called by my first/Christian name, it feels weird to me to be called "Miss (lastname)" - I tend to associate that more with my mom than with me, even though she's "Mrs." instead of "Miss." But I don't really feel a lot of connection to my name in any format, so as long as I know that someone is talking to me, I don't really care what they call me.