concept
Vashe-blagorodie ("Your Honor")
Your Honor
also: вашескородие, ваше благородие
The formal deferential address owed to an official of the eighth through fourteenth ranks in the imperial Table of Ranks, contracted in peasant speech to 'vashaskorodie'; Filaretov uses it throughout while addressing Popikov with the intimate 'ty,' the mismatch of high title and low pronoun setting up the story's title joke.
Reading notes
- On Official Business §120 your honor
Vashe-blagorodie, the address for an official one rank below vashe-vysokoblagorodie; Loshadin's single lapse into this humbler form, after nine uses of the higher title, marks his exhaustion at the very end of his long wait.
- Thou and You §11 Your Honor
Vashe-blagorodie ("Your Honor," literally "your nobility/well-born-ness") was the required formal address for officials of the eighth through fourteenth ranks of the imperial Table of Ranks; peasant speech commonly slurred it to "vashaskorodie." Filaretov uses it faithfully throughout even while addressing Popikov as "ty" -- to Filaretov the title and the pronoun aren't in conflict, since deference in his world is about the words of address you use for a superior, not the grammatical register.