vouvoy

present singular third person vouvoys · participle present vouvoying · participle past vouvoyed · past vouvoyed · alternative vousvoie · alternative vouvoie

1. rareTo address (someone) in French using the formal second-person pronoun vous.

   Americans are practically on a first-name basis with the president of the United States, after all, unlike the French, who when they’re not busy vouvoying one another are addressing one another as madame or monsieur, concealing their first names like ATM codes.

   2009, Debra Ollivier, What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind, New York, N.Y.: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   “But I thought superiors can tutoyer those under them.” “They can. Sometimes. Take Officer Kaczmarek for example. He tutoye’s some instructors, and some do it back to him. But not all of them. My director asked me to tutoyer him because we’re part of the same administrative team. There are three officers that I tutoyer. That’s part of the problem today. Children, for example, tutoyer almost everybody. I vouvoy’ed my grandparents.”

   2013, Kevin G. Karpiak, “Adjusting La Police: The Use of Distance in the Calibration of Legitimate Violence among the Police Nationale”, in William Garriott, editor, Policing and Contemporary Governance: The Anthropology of Police in Practice, Palgrave Macmillan, →DOI, →ISBN, part II (Police Violence), page 91

   Shakespeare’s audiences would doubtless have been more attuned to ‘thou-you’ shifts in stage dialogue than modern ones – though any non-native speaker of French who has made the error of ‘tutoying’ someone they should have ‘vouvoyed’ will have some idea of the effects that such shifts can have.

   2016, Pamela Bickley, Jenny Stevens, “Othello”, in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Text and Performance, Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, →ISBN, page 143

   Synonyms: vousvoyer