Dictionary. Many honorifics and niceties of address fell by the wayside during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s amid Mao Zedong's campaign against the "Four Olds". This included an attempt to eradicate expressions of deference to teachers and to others seen as preserving "counter-revolutionary" modes of thought. The defeat of the Maoist Gang of Four in the late 1970s and continuing reforms since the 1980s has, however, permitted a return of such traditional and regional expressions. Historically, the T–V distinction was observed among the Chinese by avoiding any use of common pronouns in addressing a respected audience. Instead, third-person honorifics and respectful titles were employed. One aspect of such respectful address was avoiding the use of the first-person pronoun as well, instead choosing a (typically humble) epithet in its place. The extreme of this practice occurred when Shi Huangdi abrogated the then-current first-person pronoun (zhèn); the present first-person pronoun (wǒ) subsequently developed out of the habit of referring to "this [worthless] body", the character's original meaning. An important difference between the T–V distinction in Chinese compared with modern European languages is that Chinese culture considers the relative age of the speakers an important aspect of their social distance. This is especially strong within families: while the speakers of European languages may generally prefer forms of address such as "father" or "grandpa", Chinese speakers consider using the personal names of elders such a taboo that they may not even know the given names of grandparents who live in the same apartment. While strictures against writing the personal name of any ancestor of the last seven generations are no longer observed, it remains very uncommon to name children for any living relative: younger people using the name freely would disrespect the original bearer. In the present day, the informal second-person pronoun is (Mandarin: nǐ; Minnan: lí) and the honorific pronoun is (Mandarin: nín; Minnan: lín). Much like European languages, the honorific form developed out of an earlier second-person plural: during the Jin and Yuan dynasties, the Mandarin dialects mutated (nǐměi) into (nǐmen) and then into . (A similar form , tān developed for the third-person singular but is now generally unused. While unseen elsewhere, some Beijing dialects use a further wǎnmen for the first-person plural to include a person worthy of respect, where wǎn is from wǒmen.) It is worth noting that the T–V distinction in Mandarin does not connote a