The only verb sense of parley that I know or can find in dictionaries is intransitive: to parley with someone is to confer, hold talks, etc. with them. So to parley X into Y sounds wrong to me.
The usage I know which is much closer to your example is parlay, not parley. Merriam-Webster defines it as:
to use or develop (something) to get something else that has greater value
- He hoped to parlay his basketball skills into a college scholarship.
- She parlayed $5,000 and years of hard work into a multimillion-dollar company.
So the grammar of this absolutely fits your example. Your meaning doesn’t fit into M-W’s definition; but I would tend to agree with you that it’s now used a bit more broadly than their definition, generally as something closer to “to convert X into Y” or “to refashion/reimagine/reinterpret X as Y”.
Edit: The Corpus of Contemporary American English doesn’t reflect our feeling that it’s used more broadly: every instance of ‘parlay X into Y’ I checked fits the definition given by M-W. However, it does confirm that ‘parlay’ and ‘parley’ get mixed up fairly frequently — about 10% of the hits for each were in situations where, going by the dictionary definitions, it should have been the other.
In modern use in American English, the term ma'am has gained quite a bit more use than madam:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=madam%2Cma%20%27%20am&corpus=5&smoothing=3&year_start=1950&year_end=2008
In modern use in British English, madam is slightly more popular than ma'am:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=madam%2Cma%20%27%20am&corpus=6&smoothing=3&year_start=1950&year_end=2008
As a native American English speaker, madam seems a bit archaic but does not necessarily connote a tie with a brothel unless you refer to someone as a madam. For example, the Oxford English dictionary provides the following example for madam of a brothel:
1959 N. Mailer Advts. for Myself (1961) 279 A rather remarkable woman who had been the madam of a whorehouse.
But as a form of address, it is used differently:
1956 N. Algren Walk on Wild Side ii. 122 It's not a pot, Madam. And it's strictly not for sale.
The typical terms I've heard are miss for younger females and ma'am for older ones. You could potentially refer to someone as madam or ma'am in either spoken or written communication. In formal writing, for example to someone whose name you do not know, use madam in both cases. For example:
When addressing a letter to the holder of a particular position without knowing the name or gender of the addressee, it is common to write “Dear Sir or Madam,” (or in the United States, “Dear Sir or Madam:”
This holds in both American and British English.
In less formal writing or speech, I would suggest using whichever term is more popular for the community you are in--ma'am in American English, and madam in British English. In both, madam will seem a bit more formal.
Best Answer
Yes, that usage is correct in the Philippines. Do note, however, that in Filipino English "ma'am" is not pronounced the same way as in American English, which can lead to some confusion: it's pronounced just like "Mom" or "Mum" (more akin to British or Canadian English, though the Filipino pronunciation does not originate there—it's just a coincidence that it sounds the same).
When you hear it the first few times you might be tempted to think it's a maternal reference, but it isn't. Instead, it's used as an honorific for an older woman worthy of respect because of her professional or community position of prominence (for instance, a pastor's wife).