I have noticed in recent years, a commendable tendency to reuse the words Mr./Mrs. and Mr./Mrs. in affirmative contexts. Well done, great, I support effectively, as Žika Obretković would say. It's definitely better to be Mr./Ms. than to be a little girl, there's no doubt about it.
It's not that gentlemen and gentlemanly behavior didn't exist before, it certainly did. Both during and after JB Titus. Admittedly, sporadically and somehow in a constantly decreasing trend, but still. It's just that it wasn't talked about much. Some thought that it was not very convenient to highlight it publicly, in today's language - it was not politically correct; some pretended that it didn't exist at all in fear that such behaviors would start to be expected of them; and some, especially the younger ones, looked at the lordship as a figment of some jaded old men, and therefore worthy of ridicule. Let me remind you, at that time, around the eighties, for the kids, the generational one was incomparably more important than the class or ideological struggle.
Later came the wars for Tito's silverware and tompus, some urban and some rural peasants rejected their natural beauty and discovered the magic of powder drugs, an exodus of normality, intelligence and civility followed anywhere and across any border and everything went to hell. Again, a little later, we learned the two most important lessons for life in Serbia - that hope is a big joke and that there is no bottom, and that's how we found ourselves in this. Where are we now?
The concept of lordship or ladyship, as it used to be said, is usually associated with the bourgeois context of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, so we imagine a gentleman in a black suit with a top hat and a cane, and a lady with a hat and a parasol. But that's just the influence of movies and literature. Lordship, of course, has nothing to do with material condition, belonging to a class, even less race, origin or status.
Mr. Man hides in the most unexpected places, just like a simpleton, they cannot be geolocated and grouped so easily. Much more complex instrumentation is necessary for this job. As much as we have nothing against the bourgeoisie, and in general we don't, old Glembay, his son Leone and certainly Baroness Castelli can hardly be called gentlemen. But Jovan Vava Hristić and Milan Delčić Delča, my grandfather Mija and grandfather Vito, Srđa Popović and Latinka Perović, for example, can and must. There is also a nice story, when by mistake they enter a cabin where a woman is changing on the beach, a nice man will say: Excuse me, madam. And Mr. Man, wanting to completely protect her from discomfort, will say: Excuse me, sir. Also, it should be reminded here that the most important quality of a gentleman is that it is not enough for him to be lordly, but he himself, with his existence, forces others to become so as well.
Now, apart from the original one, we also had a red bourgeoisie that we laughed at so much for their arrogance and snobbery, and today, when we look at how far we've come, we would make them out of mud. We also laughed at their tennis on Sundays in white sweaters and bridge games, at all their attempts to hide their origins from the Balkan ravines and leave their parents hidden in those ravines so that no one could see them, we also laughed at their sad schizophrenia when they were on party forums in the morning glorified worker self-management and criticized revisionist phenomena in socialist society, and in the afternoon lived the life of a class enemy.
But still, precisely among them, and especially among their children, we will find a good number of those who made the life of the city significantly more tolerable. Part of that team was to blame for Zvezda and the Golden Parrot, but the other was responsible for the New Wave, the Academy and the famous eighties. With other people from the city, of course. And it was, as far as I remember, the closest thing to lordship that this society of ours managed to throw.
As is often the case with any innovation, the idea of restoring lordship as a value appeared quietly. She was born in a narrow circle of devotees who could no longer tolerate the tyranny of Djiber and the general simpletons around them, Zeman came, so they remembered some rare historical periods, in equally rare societies when the nobility had power, and sometimes even power, and spontaneously tried to renew that spirit. They were small conspiratorial groups, trying to live their lives, as much as their circumstances allowed, in accordance with the requirements of gentlemanly behavior and worldview. They simply use their personal example, in accordance with their capabilities, to ensure that this idea does not disappear irretrievably.
You see, it somehow seemed logical to me, and according to the rules of the trade, at this point in the story, I would give a definition or at least an explanation of the term in question - lordship. And now I realized that I don't have to. It could be that I can't. But there is no need. Everyone, but just about everyone, somehow intuitively knows and recognizes when someone is behaving like a jerk or like a gentleman.
Well, those conspirators of ours - they didn't do anything special, they just made sure that during the day, none of their actions, not even their thoughts, were sarcastic. They recognized each other easily, usually through small gestures and code words, quite a few passwords, with which they addressed each other spontaneously, of course with the obligatory dose of self-irony and banter - young lady, my dear friend, dear friend, respected colleague, ma'am, sir. A slight bow went along with it. Unusual, unusual, fresh, modern, and rooted in old traditions, just like any serious avant-garde has always been. And the most important catch was that none of those people realized that they were part of some group or conspiracy. Because mastery, like other good practices in life, can neither be imposed nor learned. It can be developed, it can be bought through serious efforts and sacrifices and with great care not to spoil it, but not to get it. So the term conspiracy group here should be taken conditionally.
And the term itself has proved to be particularly attractive lately, the number of its advocates has grown, it has gradually entered the public space and the media and almost imperceptibly has become part of the mainstream. And when something becomes widely accepted, many people want to join and inflation inevitably occurs. A product or some concept wears out a little from use, and other anomalies occur on the market, such as brand theft, so misunderstood or mutilated ideas begin to be offered around under the name of real, unspoiled ones, similar to how goods are offered on the market Ralex watches, Michaelsoft Binbows operating systems and Sanbaks coffee - it's similar, but not exactly the same. You even get to the very end, so you simply stick the original label on your bofl goods. There are countless examples, and there was also a recorded case, it was in Vladičina Han, during the seventies, when that beautiful Spirit of Ecstasy was taken off a Rolls-Royce somewhere in the world, and put on a local three-hundred-year-old. What color are you? Yellow, normal.
The success of this concept has inevitably led to the fact that the adjective Mr. is attached excessively to everything and anything, and that Mrs. and Mr. are now some kind of titles that are really lightly and too easily awarded both to those to whom they belong and to others. I heard, here, almost one really horrible, unruly word, uttered with the best of intentions, which does not in the least diminish its rudeness. Namely, for some young female person, in an act of enthusiasm, they said that she was great, that she was a lady, brother. And here we have another science - there is no noble word or concept that people cannot ruin.
