R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Save Your Money, Give A Gift with Meaning
Think back to your favorite childhood memory that involves a relative, even a shirt-tail relative. How does it make you feel? What did you call them? Do you know how you were related to them? Were you technically related to them? Does it matter?
Consider these two sentences:
1) I spent the day at the park with Stan.
2) I spent the day at the park with my Grandpa.
Now, Stan may be a perfectly lovely gentleman, but when I read the word Grandpa, I have a much deeper, more meaningful response. This is not personal, as I had one Grandpa who was a lottery win and one who was more of the “odd-duck” variety. It is about the term in general.
Over the past few generations many Americans have developed a relational habit of calling parents and grandparents by their first names. At first, I found this quite shocking, as Americans have always been so fond of titles. Face it, we love our royals. We race to purchase a square foot of land in Scotland not to save a castle, but so we may have a piece of paper declaring us a Lord or Lady, and we fall all over a business card with alphabet soup after…
