What’s ma’am, mam?

A boy at an interview through instant messenger:

Boy: Mam, I want to know more about this job.

Interviewer Lady: I think you texted the wrong person. I am not your mother.

Boy: But mam, I never called you mother.

Interviewer Lady: You say never, yet you seem to do it forever. Your behaviour reminds me of Star-Lord.

Boy: Mam, I just used short form of madam.

Interviewer Lady: I see that you were busy having no idea that it’s ma’am over mam.

Boy: What’s ma’am, mam?

Interviewer Lady: Rejected.

Many of us have no regard for punctuation and this disregard may fetch us no regard. English people being the big-time borrowers they were, borrowed the word madam from French ma dame, which literally means “my lady.” Ever heard the word milady in some royal movies?

Anyway, the English just dropped the space between my and lady i.e. ma and dame, shot off the e at the end and formed madam. Well, the slaughter of characters didn’t stop there. They killed d too. They were left with ma am. Something seemed familiar and out of place and suspicious. In order to fill in the void created by the absence of d, they called in the void filler i.e. apostrophe. An apostrophe is known to take the place when someone “turns away.”
Thus, we got ma’am.

Let’s get to a serious note. The word mam is another word for mother. So every time you called someone mam, you unknowingly considered them to be your mother. Whenever we omit any letter or sound, we need someone to tell that someone has been killed. An apostrophe is the punctuation mark which is used to denote the omission of a letter or a sound.
e.g. “It’s” comes from “It is.” We omitted i in is, so we use ‘ and form it’s.

Or say 5 o’clock. It literally means the time is 5 of clock. We dropped f, we collected ’ and we formed o’clock. So know your punctuation and identify who’s ma’am and who isn’t mam.