Rod: I’d be happier if the neighborhood kids used any form of address to me. They obviously have no clue how to address an adult, and so say nothing at all.

If one of my kids’ playmates wants to get my attention, he points himself in my direction ad says: “Excuse me.” If there are several adults in a group, and he particularly wants to get my attention and not someone else’s, he comes over and taps me, or looks right up at me, before saying “Excuse me.”

When I overhear him speaking about me in the third person, I am “Danny’s Dad.”

I am quite sure no Long Island child has ever addressed me as “Sir.” I am pretty sure that none has ever addressed me as “Mr. Derbyshire,” either.

Nor has a child ever called me “John,” that I can recall. Any child who did so would, of course, be banned from my property for life. I think kids sense these things. (I also think that my neighbors have put it into their kids’ heads that I am eccentric, so the kids are a bit intimidated by me.

Perhaps they call other kids’ fathers “Mike” or “Joe,” I don’t know.)

It is not that older forms of address have been replaced by newer, less satisfactory ones. So far as I can see, forms of address from children to

adults have vanished altogether.