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

[James C Stalker]

Were you Father Shuy or shy Father?


Roger Shuy writes:

> on 5/14/05 10:19 PM, Laurence Horn at laurence.horn at YALE.EDU wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> 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?
>>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> --> -
>>
>> 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
>



James C. Stalker
Department of English
Michigan State University