My students agreed and asserted there was little if anything less simple in the language of respect than the common, if less used these days, expressions "please" and "thank you." Seeing and feeling this language in the conscious perspective of the becoming self, the moral sphere, and the end principle, they take on a far greater depth than most of my students or people in general realize in their meaning perspectives.
Most parental figures still tell their children to say "please" and "thank you" as part of their reaching for the higher cause meaning perspective they feel but don't know or understand. We can note that by and large, these parental figures don't use "please" and "thank you" with those very same children. This happens even when they tell their children to use those two words themselves recalling the "do as I say not as I do" principle we encountered earlier. When I asked why we use these two words, most students and others answered that it was "polite" to do so. I asked why they worked in that way as language, why polite. Often they had no answer or said "because it shows respect." When asked about respect, we wind up back at polite. One very good way to tell something learned through the dominator/conformist model appears when people believe in something, like what to say in some situation, but lack any explanation, any consciousness about why that's the case. That holds true for polite language, so called, and it may also be why it use diminishes over time. When such language of recognition diminishes, it diminishes us in our everyday lives.
"Please" and "thank you" represent the language of recognition quite directly and well. Such language serves as a sign of our recognition of the full humanness of another person regardless of age or condition. It speaks out of the need for the I/Thou relationship in the smallest detail of our verbal exchanges with one another. When we say "please" to another, we verbally recognize that person as an end in her/himself and not simply as a means to our end. Nobody "has to" do much of anything in life generally, and they certainly don't "have to" do it for someone else. When someone serves us, she/he consents to making our end their end as a kind of gift. That holds true in the workplace as well. When people serve us, we can connect with them by asking them for help and still recognizing their independence as equal and independent beings by says "please" and "thank you."
I almost always read name tags and use the name of the person with whom I deal. I ask that person to help me not implicitly demand help. I ask, which means "please" as part of my question or request. I often ask how people are, and I actually listen to the answer. That takes the question "how are you" out of the phatic, rather empty and conformist social noises, and into the communicative. When the exchange finishes, I thank others for their help even if the result did not fully satisfy my material need, the business might not sell what I asked for or have it in stock, but the exchange still can meet both our human needs.
When I worked with students on customer service, we discussed how we can say "Yes" even while we say "No." When we satisfy the essential needs of our customer, that person feels recognized and cared about. We say "Yes" even as we may need to say "No" out of honesty. The training program I worked in had its name and number listed under "Employment" in the telephone business listings. In hard times, people would go through those listing asking for openings. A call from such a person had no business value for the training program, and I could offer no job possibilities for the caller. That's a "No" for both sides of such a conversation. However, I could still ask for the caller's name and tell her/him that I knew she/he had gotten to my number, a "w" listing, by going through the long list of numbers one by one. I congratulated the caller for working so diligently to find a job, any job. I asked if they knew of other resources that I could offer the caller, and if the caller didn't know the information, I told her/him about these resources. When the caller thanked me, she/he did so mindfully. In a very personal way, we made a "Yes" out of the "No" of the situation.
After such an exchange, the person who has served our need might say "you're welcome."[129] That offers meaning and recognition. It says that the exchange has worked well for the speaker, and the speaker welcomes us to ask for help again. Instead of the cold and calculating process based only on a material exchange, this has become a moment of mutual recognition and reciprocation of the I/Thou, a moment lived out in the moral sphere. Instead of a mercenary exchange about money alone, it becomes an exchange of gifts, the gift of the unconditional and the becoming self.