Further re title use at Chicago

[Alan Rumsey]

Further to Mike Salovesh's interesting observations concerning "old U of
Chicago traditions where the preferred terms of reference/address were
"Mr.","Mrs.", "Miss", or (latterly) "Ms.", an important datum about these
traditions (as I recall from my student days at Chicago during 1968-77) was
that these forms of address were used reciprocally. The effect of this as I
understood  it (perhaps with help from Brown and Ford 1961) was to index
our classroom interactions and the Chicago academic environment in general
as serious, high-powered stuff, while suppressing any overt recognition of
the hierarchical disparity between students and professors. This usage was
almost universal at Chicago at that time, an interesting exception being
the reciprocal use of first names between graduate students and professors
in the linguistics department. I believe this was an innovation that had
come only recently with the arrival of such young Turks as Jim McCawley and
Jerry Saddock. From more recent visits to Chicago I know that at least some
anthropology professors persist with the reciprocal title-plus surname
usage, but I would be interested to hear from any of you who could fill us
in more detail about this.

Yrs,
Mr. Rumsey

At 03:14 PM 7/20/2003 -0500, Mike Salovesh wrote:
>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".

Alan Rumsey, Senior Fellow
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
Australian National University
Canberra, ACT 0200
Australia

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