Inexorably approaching my 75th year I find it exceedingly irksome to be addressed by my first name by people I don't know, have had no previous acquaintance with, and who are, invariably, just latterly out of diapers, so to speak. Wet, both behind the ears and elsewhere on their anatomy.

But then, two decades earlier I similarly chafed at the loosening of social conventions that made it seem perfectly all right for strangers to express this kind of familiarity. I protested then, as I do now, albeit not vigorously, but to little avail.

Invariably, when I quietly suggest to a young person that I would prefer to be addressed with my family name foremost and a suitable prefix, the stunned disbelief that crosses the face of that individual expresses perfectly their social ignorance.

In fact, when it occurs, as it does infrequently, but did yesterday afternoon when I informed a young woman who must have been between nineteen and her early twenties that I would appreciate her not using my given name without my express permission, she haughtily responded in a quite offensive manner. It was clear that I had offended her sense of social entitlement. Social propriety was obviously something she had never been exposed to as an antediluvian convention irrelevant to her awareness.

It was obviously quite clear she had no idea whatever that she had offended my sense of personal space.

At one time, not all that distant in the past, social convention had it that as a matter of universally-applied respect conferred upon others, only an invitation to intimacy of expression would suffice to permit someone to address another person by their given name. Now, the rudely impertinent convention is to do so on a most casual, self-entitled basis.

It would be refreshing to see a return to social courtesy that was once extended to everyone, but appears now to have been abandoned to a misplaced perception of social equality.