>One of my teachers was Argentinian and she was somewhat difficult to understand, true. The toughest thing to get used to was she was insistent on using usted predominently instead of tu and she always said 'Joe' (a softer ch sound, not a really hard J) not 'yo' :o)
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>I've often wondered what the inner emotional reaction is, when someone is addressed with 'tu' instead of 'usted'.

I can answer that from a French perspective. Some years ago a friend and I, in France, were at his french girlfriend's house for dinner (from 1930 - 0130
:-). In defernece to our hosts we attempted to speak the whole evening in French, even privately to each other. Now her dad, whom I'd just met for the first time, was very gallic, rather brusque, confident, formal ... generally pretty formidable and a little scary to a 20-odd YO as I was. We'd been "vousing" all evening around him. He must have been impressed by ourattempts cos at one point he suddenly pointed his knife at me and said, "Comment t'appelle-tu, ton prenom?". I felt 10 feet tall. It was a great sense of being recognised and respected, accepted.

BTW we were eating fish stew (from his catch of the day) and I was used to filleted fish in the UK. Too late I learned the French word for fish bones is "angles" not "os", when the pa called out to me "Attention les angles", just as the fish bones formed a game of Kerplunk in my mouth :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KerPlunk_%28game%29

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>Any time I ever used 'usted', the response was a friendly, 'no, no, por favor, tu, no usted'. I guess it's the equivalent of someone calling me 'Mr. Goff' and then me saying, 'no, it's Kevin'.
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>I guess maybe the reverse is somewhat like the reaction (more like correction) I once received, of, "it's Ms." ;)