"Leader DeLay"??? What's up with that?

[Roger Shuy]

on 5/14/05 10:19 PM, Laurence Horn at laurence.horn at YALE.EDU wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Leader DeLay"??? What's up with that?
>
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> At 12:32 PM -0500 5/14/05, Barbara Need wrote:
>>> One of my professors goes by her first name with graduate students but
>>> prefers undergraduates to call her Dr., specifically because one does
>>> not have to hold a Ph.D. to lecture at my university. She told me that
>>> she would be fine without that title if she were teaching at an
>>> institution where all teaching were doctors.
>>>
>>>
>>> -Lal
>>>
>>> Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>>>>
>>>> An old study (source forgotten) relates "Dr." and "Professor" titles
>>>> to prestige of institution. More prestige, less doctoring and
>>>> professoring.
>>>>
>>>> dInIs
>>
>> At the University of Chicago, professors are (traditionally) called
>> Mr or Mrs/Ms/Miss, not Doctor, not Professor. Someone once explained
>> this to me, but I don't remember what the UofC rationale was.
>
> Probably the same as at Yale (we do share that [+ gothic] feature,
> after all), where "Mr. X" was de rigueur for men, and "Miss/Mrs. X"
> for women (this was when institutions like Yale and the N. Y. Times
> didn't deign to recognize "Ms.").   So it was Mr. Bloch  and Miss
> Haas and such.  But then first-naming came in, along with jeans and
> such, before I arrived in '81, and it's been downhill ever since.
> The rationale for the earlier practice as stated to me was that it
> was assumed that everyone at Yale is both a professor and a PhD, so
> it would be infra dig to flaunt such titles.
>
> Larry
>
But I'll be you never had the problem that we had at Georgetown, where,
after the Jesuits began wearing civies in public,  Protestant male teachers
 like me sometimes very mistakenly got called Father.

Roger