Segacs's World I Know

This new rule is designed to increase doctor-patient respect:

The hospital’s administration will ask staff to address patients using the formal French pronoun “vous’”instead of the informal “tu.”

[ . . . ]

He says staff who repeatedly ignore the new measure will face disciplinary action and could eventually be suspended without pay.

Hey, any hospital that addresses patients by a name instead of by the name of a disease is a positive development.

But as a person who frequently stumbles over her French, I’m a little sensitive to this rule in particular. I’m sure this isn’t much of an issue in Saguenay, where French is spoken by basically everyone, but I personally have a particularly hard time with the tu/vous distinction. Oh, I understand it well enough, but when I’m speaking quickly or I’m flustered, the wrong one often slips out. I blame it on my grade school French curriculum, which – ostensibly to avoid confusion – taught us to say “tu” when addressing any person in the singular second person, including our teachers. It’s hard to break the habit now and I have made some embarrassing gaffes when addressing professors or even clients too familiarly.

Maybe I’m being over-sensitive, but instituting a rule that could result in suspension seems a bit heavy-handed to me. If the lesson the hospital is trying to teach to staff is respect, maybe they could try having a little respect for their staffers. Most likely, a simple memo reminding people to use “vous” would be enough, rather than a rule. Besides, there’s a lot more to respect than pronouns, and any staff members with truly disrespectful attitudes should be disciplined regardless of what exact words they use.

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