... Note title use

[Mike Salovesh]

YMMV -- or, rather, your local dialect may vary.

I was raised on some old U of Chicago traditions where the preferred terms
of reference/address were "Mr.",
"Mrs.", "Miss", or (latterly) "Ms."  "Professor X" was an extremely rare
usage. (It often was reserved for those who held named endowed chairs.) As
for "Doctor", there were four reasons for using the term. The person so
labeled might be

1.  some kind of medicine man or medicine woman.  (Medical doctor or
dentist, usually, but various other bedoctored curing people and medical
-ologists also qualified.) That's because people in the curing professions
insist on the title.  (A recent stay in a British hospital taught me that
senior professors in a medical school setting there are called "Mr. X", a
title that outranks a mere "Dr. X".)

2.  someone who just successfully defended a Ph. D. dissertation, in which
case the appropriate greeting was "Congratulations, Doctor!" Usually, you
only said that once.

3.  someone who was both a leading scholar (Nobel prize winner, say),
gifted with a lovable personality, and so awe-inspiring that there just had
to be some way of showing honor in a term of address. Or, anyhow, two out
of those three. Enrico Fermi was "Doctor Fermi". (In the anthropology
department, Robert Redfield often was called "Dr. Redfield". You could
measure students' progress through the department by when they moved from
"Mr. Tax" (or "Tax" as term of reference) to "Sol Tax" to "Sol"; "Eggan/Mr.
Eggan", "Fred Eggan", "Fred", etc. I don't recall hearing anyone say "Bob
Redfield" or addressing him as "Bob".)

4.  somebody who was snottily overreaching, in which case saying "Dr. X"
meant "And who the hell do you think you are, DOCTOR?"

That accounts for two features of my dialect down through the years. First,
I don't like being called "Doctor", since I don't fit those first three
categories and I don't want to be put in the fourth. Second, I am
punctilious about calling any insufferably pompous professorial idiot "Dr.
X" -- repeatedly, just to make the point. (The best part of that is that
they never realize how deeply I'm insulting them.)

--  mike salovesh     <m-salovesh-9 at alumni.uchicago.edu>     PEACE !!!

P.S.: I take that back. When I'm making appointments with traditional
medicine practitioners, I call myself "Dr. Salovesh" simply because that
makes it more likely that I'll get what I want. Those who work in clinics,
hospitals, or in any other setting where medical doctors practice their
arts are used to snapping to attention when talking to anyone called
"Doctor".