My sympathy on the thing with your father. That sort of thing must feel like an unexpected slap in the face.
On your other subject-- I certainly don't think of people by epithet, not unless I don't know or have forgotten their name. Even then, I'm more likely to think of so-and-so's mother or friend than an epithet. My memory for visual details is rotten, but I'm likely to try to call up a visual memory of someone if I think about them and can't remember or never knew their name. The exceptions would be things like 'creepy white guy with a beard' or 'young soldier I saw on the bus that one time,' and I'm not likely to use something like that in writing anything but a character's thoughts or spoken words. I think that descriptions in place of names tend to be more detailed than what most authors use.
I do, occasionally, in writing use short epithets if they're something unique enough to describe only one person of the character's acquaintance or only one person present-- I had a character in an anime/manga fandom who kept thinking of someone who was attacking him as 'the gaijin' because he didn't know the man's name. In the same fandom, there's one named character who's a telepath. People who don't know any other telepaths might think of him as 'the telepath,' but when I wrote him in a setting with lots of telepaths, that descriptor went away completely because it could describe many different people.
no subject
On your other subject-- I certainly don't think of people by epithet, not unless I don't know or have forgotten their name. Even then, I'm more likely to think of so-and-so's mother or friend than an epithet. My memory for visual details is rotten, but I'm likely to try to call up a visual memory of someone if I think about them and can't remember or never knew their name. The exceptions would be things like 'creepy white guy with a beard' or 'young soldier I saw on the bus that one time,' and I'm not likely to use something like that in writing anything but a character's thoughts or spoken words. I think that descriptions in place of names tend to be more detailed than what most authors use.
I do, occasionally, in writing use short epithets if they're something unique enough to describe only one person of the character's acquaintance or only one person present-- I had a character in an anime/manga fandom who kept thinking of someone who was attacking him as 'the gaijin' because he didn't know the man's name. In the same fandom, there's one named character who's a telepath. People who don't know any other telepaths might think of him as 'the telepath,' but when I wrote him in a setting with lots of telepaths, that descriptor went away completely because it could describe many different people.