"My lord" would be considered an acceptable inferior-to-superior, equal-to-equal address, and even superior-to-inferior address of general respect. The pig farmer uses it when talking to the sheriff, the sheriff uses it when talking to the bailiff, the bailiff uses it when talking to the count who uses it when talking to the Duke who uses it when talking to the king who uses it when talking to God.
"Lord" is still a nonspecific reference to rank but it is more specific than 'my lord.' Baron/Count//Viscount/Earl Scarlett are all 'Lord Scarlett.' Duke Scarlett is 'Duke Scarlett' and not Lord Scarlett, and King Scarlett is most definitely not Lord Scarlett.
Eh... I find that being anally retentive about titles really just makes you look like an uptight jackass to the rest of the realm. It's more likely to win you ridicule rather than respect.
This is a very 20th/21st century view. In any Western Medieval land, there were few things more important than social rank because it represented civilization - without it you'd just have 'strongest wins' and so even when it sucked it was the agreed-upon system for recognizing authority, excepting of course all of the times you didn't recognize it and had an army at your back.
Real respect must be earned. It doesn't come as a perk with the title.
Of course, but this is not mutually exclusive with the above. Bowing and scraping was very important but these were gestures. Real respect was something else entirely. Everyone is expecting to go through the motions; it's like knowing the rules to football when you show up for a match. It doesn't say anything about how good a player you are - just that you've done the requisite work to be allowed to participate.
The best sword-fighter in the world isn't going to be allowed to rise very far if he craps all over the pecking order because if you get rid of the pecking order all you have is despotism, and even the medievals knew that that wasn't preferable. Tuchman's
A Distant Mirror brings this up a lot - it's very easy for us to look back at the 1300s and go 'wow that sucked' but even as corrupt as the nobility and Catholic church were back then, most everybody still preferred that system to the dark ages. Medieval hierarchy was the least bad system available to them at the time, and in some respects was superior to later systems in that you didn't have absolute monarchies or slavery in the West (serfdom was much, much better) as you did in the 1500s and 1600s.
