Terms of address as keys to culture and society: German "Herr" vs. Polish "Pan"

This article takes up a theme addressed many years ago by Andrzej Bogusławski: a semantic and cultural comparison of the Polish and German terms of address “Pan” and “Herr.” Focussing on these two words, the paper seeks to demonstrate (as in a number of earlier studies, e.g. Wierzbicka 2015, Forthcoming) that despite their apparent insignificance, generic titles used daily across Europe can reveal complex and intricate webs of cultural assumptions and attitudes and provide keys to the inmost recesses of the speakers’ cultural and social world. At the same time, the paper argues that in order to use these keys effectively, we need some basic locksmith skills and it tries to show that the NSM approach to semantics and pragmatics can help us develop such skills. The explications posited here possess, it is argued, predictive and explanatory power which is beyond the reach of traditional analyses operating with technical labels such as “formal,” ”polite,” “respectful,” “egalitarian” and so on. The paper has implications for language teaching and cross-cultural communication and education in Europe and beyond.