dr. emptywheel
FWIW, like Dr. Black, I occasionally dig out my title and try it on for size.
I admit I sometimes do so when making dinner reservations at hoity toity places.
Mostly, though, I keep it ready and polished especially for when when fatuous old men call me "Miss."
And if I were a petite, beautiful blonde like Dr. Jill Biden, engaged in the tough work of teaching adult students English, I’d be sure to whip out that title on regular basis. You got one of these, inane LAT journalist?
I didn’t think so.
And frankly, much as I loathed Dr. Condi Rice as Secretary of State, I do find it annoying that she (and Dr. Maddie Albright, for that matter) never got called Dr. Secretary of State even while people still call Dr. Kissinger by his title.
I call them all Dr’s Butt Plug for all the shit they rained down on the Earths population.
proposal for an alternative solution: jill, condi, maddie and hank.
Dr. Wheeler, you’ll find that title is really helpful in Mexico and Central America. Back in the early ’80s, before many people had small portable radios, we used to take the garage door opener, put it on the waist, and register as Dr. Got us really great rooms!
Oh yes.
But you’ll also find that there is no question, in other countries, about whether or not to honor someone with a PhD with a title.
There’s not the kind of anti-intellectual stuff there, and PhDs are actually quite celebrated, unlike here.
i don’t think it’s anti-intellectual to refrain from using titles – in fact just the opposite. it’s related to that old blogosphere ethic of what counts is not the title, it’s the evidence, argument and sense, if any, in one’s post or comment.
Hey
There’s a reason I don’t use my title here and rarely discuss my PhD.
But there’s a difference between that and treating people who have gone to school for 9 years in a subject with disdain whereas you treat others who go to school for three years as if they’re a special class. This country has very little interest in those who have PhDs which is almost unique in the world. It’s as if there is nothing you can do in that haul of research that is worthwhile to society.
It’s sadly societal, which means it has it’s roots in the media messages that are portrayed and consumed. Behind it though is a sinister agenda:
Karl Rove.
GEORGE W. BUSH
The American people have entered into a pact with their Media/Banking/Congressional overlords. As long as we all agree to buy the shit they feed us (and pay to keep the TeeVee hooked up), they will keep us entertained with bread & circuses.
When the pending Greatest Bush/Cheney Depression reaches its depths, they will no doubt give us free cable along with our government cheese. How else will they continue to convince us not to respect the opinions of the most educated in our midst?
that’s why my alternative was to use first names for everyone. in no way does that preclude honoring genuine contributions to society, whether in research or any other endeavor – it’s just an acknowledgment that titles are not a measure of that contribution. but the only point i wanted to make is that refraining from using titles (across the board) has imo nothing to do with anti-intellectualism. ymmv.
Well, your example only involved PhDs, not medical doctors or generals or Secretaries of State or lawyers (who tend to use titles primarily in writing). Are you getting rid of all those titles?
I agree we’re all better off without titles. But we’re a long way from being a title free society.
I’m a little late to the parade on this, but we have two close PhD friends, both women, and both of whom I always refer to as Doctor X and Doctor Y. They are always tickled that I insist on it, as I am sure it is rare that people do so.
well, Dr.Wheeler, let me say I understand Dr. Biden’s decision to use her title completely. After all, in a college town, anyone over 40 is old, and anyone without a doctorate is undereducated. She is simply avoiding the appearance of the latter ;p
Click through for some educational comments in the Media Matter post. It’s a well read group that comments there.
A friend from undergraduate school who got his doctorate at UChicago in economics says, when we call him Doctor, “you can call me professor.” He teaches finance, worked at the NY fed, and has a expertise in credit markets. I’ll have to ask him when and if he uses his degree title.
I’m not so sure that he meant Professor as a “lesser” title than Dr. In the Ivys you need a doctorate to get the title of professor; so in fact, Dr. is lower that Professor in that world.
My friend like Marcy is unpretentious. I think he would prefer to not be called Dr. by his friends for reasons mentioned above. Another friend has his MFA (masters) and teaches at Cornell with the title professor but I take your point.
FWIW, I never used “Professor” or “Dr.” while in the classroom–I found less formal classrooms were more effective.
Yes Ms. Wheeler ;-P
“We now call, as a witness to the Prosecution, in the case of U.S. Versus Richard “Darth” Cheney, Dr. Marcy T. Wheeler”
… kinda has a nice ring to it …
I’d be much more impressed if it were Dr. Carnifax…
You’re mistaken here about Kissinger. He was called “Doctor” for his medical experiments on orphans, not for his work as Secretary of State.
Unlike China and East Asia, where you worked, and France and Germany, for example, Ph.D.’s here are lower on the pecking order than your average bachelor’s or master’s degree student who runs a business. Bush represents and advocated the anti-intellectual spirit that is America and its big businesses, where earning or at least acquiring money is considered more important than any other contribution to society. I wonder whether it’s because propaganda like, “People are our most important asset!” rings hollow to someone who can observe, think and write. Just askin’.
If you’re so big on titles, did you ever refer to him as Prince Cheney?
It’s not easy to earn a PoD.
Good gawd. The New York Times had an unusual rule regarding honorifics, and perhaps still does (I’ve long ago surrendered my manual on style and usage. In the regular pages, but not the sports pages, Dr., Mr., Mrs. or Ms. are/were always used. With the exception, that is, of convicted criminals. And then came Watergate. When H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman returned from their 18 months behind bars, the Times retained the “Mr.” in front of their names. So, even if Henry the K ever does step outside the country and is snatched off the street for an appearance in court on crimes against humanity, I am sure that the “Dr.” will be retained on the pages of the Gray Lady.
God forbid that a person’s professional title be used to describe them when speaking of their professional work.
And if someone’s got a problem with that, tell ‘em they can ask the Rev. Dr. Peterr about it.
A friend of mine is a countess (she married a Polish count.) She says it gets her nothing in Europe, where Countesses are a dime a dozen, but in America we still think nobility is cool, so she calls up restaurants pretending to be a social secretary making reservations for the Countess, and they treat her great.
I lived with a Count and Countess in Paris. She was an American with a crappy ass accent who married into the title. But he was the real thing, with pictures of the family Chateaux on the walls (and, still, a Manor estate close to Lyons). The Frenchies could distinguish between his old title and the Napoleonic titles, partly because of the sheer number of names he had.
Hanging out with them was okay, though, bc I’d get invitations to things like rose baptisms and the wedding invite for their very punkish daughter (I used to walk in on her on Saturday nights drinking 5 boys under the table with dad’s good wine) was probably the fanciest one I’ve ever had, though I believe she married up titles, too. She was gorgeous AND coudl drink all teh boys under the table.
accountability
I’ve found that in the education biz, which Dr. Biden is part of, “doctor” is most often used to denote which folks have gone beyond their masters. At the community college level, you’ve got people teaching with both degrees, and the ones with doctorates often use the title to differentiate. I don’t see anything wrong with it; I saw all the work my wife went through to earn her masters plus 47 hours. She wasn’t interested in getting her doctorate, although I encouraged it since she’d already put in virtually all the work to get it.
Redshift: You have to admit that “Duchess emptywheel” does have a slightly better ring than “Dr. emptywheel.”
I thought it was Dr. Accountability.
It was Dr. Accountability, now that you remind me. But on MB’s suggestion, I’m thinking of adopting Countess Accountability.
I don’t understand this issue. Does not the D in PhD mean “doctor” and does not the Ph mean “philosophy”. And does not the D in MD mean “doctor” an does not the M mean “medicine”.
“doctor “teacher,” from doct- stem of docere “to show, teach,”
Pseudo-intellectual rank-pulling it is. Anyone who is a skilled teacher is a “doctor”. A doctor of English teaches students English. A doctor of medicine teaches patients medicine, as much as is required for healthcare.
It sounds like Villager snootiness to me. And I have no problem at all calling you Dr. Emptywheel. We’ve learned a lot here.
Oh, please don’t make a practice of it. Countess Accountability, sure, but Dr.?
Her Excellency and Eminence Dr. Countess Accountability (or HEEDCA for short)
There you go, and she coined it herself:
“Countess Accountability”
There was a time when a baccalaureate had substantial worth. Then colleges diluted it, forcing students to stay more years to get advanced degrees.
I know a crisis of scintillatingly brief proportions occurred for me when offered a post which should have gone to a prof more expert than I at my young years. My honorable decision was reimmersion in postgrad work, denying the job offer to teach college. I thought that to propose to teach, for me, would have been a propagation of myths that administration and perhaps even some faculty, would have preferred I support, but I would not entertain the idea of serving to support that dilution of the profession of teaching itself.
The result was no title. It is fine for calling reservations to envening clubs which specialize in comedy entertainment, however. I guess they figure a person with no title is best offered the closest seat at the front of the house, someone who will laugh loudly as comedians ridicule the foibles of the modern world.
What did George Bush and Karl Rove each write their masters thesis on?
Now I’m curious. What was your favorite course to teach… Ms Wheeler?
It was “Marcy.”
Probably a course on newspaper novels. Teaching Count of Monte Cristo kicks ass.
It’s amazing what you can do with a spoon or an industrial strike. Imagine what could be done if there were free access to more conventional tools.
Scanned the thread but didn’t see it: what’s your degree in? (Personally, I’ve slid back into using plain Mr. again, although when I had a university appointment I used the Dr.) (Also personally, I have muttered for years that if you want something found out, you had better get yourself a few Ph.D. types, because they’ll get the truth or die trying.)
Comparative Literature.
I looked at section of the newspaper where non-Anglo speaking countries had cool, sometimes politically important essays, but also where they serialized novels. It was a lot about new media (industrial newspapers), discourse, and politics.
It spanned the Count of Monte Cristo to Czech dissident samizdat, among other things.
For this one post alone – thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!
*sigh* … no mention of how many guys you drank under the Table though, C.A. … I guess that’s
privileged info. … *g*
We Countesses guard our privileges closely, you know.
I’m late to the party here, but I live the other humorous side of this issue. In real life (as opposed to my nom de blog), I’m not a doctor, but my wife is (of the MD variety). That drives the writers of formal invitations crazy. They are used to writing Dr. and Mrs. John Doe, but can’t quite figure out how to address me and my wife. In case you need to know, it’s Mr. John and Dr. Mary Doe. You could even address the other case as Dr. John and Mrs. Mary Doe. If the couple has different last names, you can use Mr. John Doe and Dr. Mary Roe.
Well, up here near Borg Central, we’ve had plenty of experience knowing how to address those kinds of invitations.
Too bad you still have to educate those southerners ;-)))
I had that kind of fun while still married to my ex-wife … not only is she an M.D., at the time she was also a Major … and to make it even more fun, I have a PhD and of course we had different last names.
FWIW I do not often use the title “Doctor” outside of an academic setting … I used it while I was teaching, but not in my current occupation. But it’s nice to have it in the back pocket for certain situations … every once in a while I get to whip out the title and flummox someone with it.
My wife is a PhD, but doesn’t use the Dr, except for the occasional emergency, like getting bumped on airlines and stuff.
But don’t forget the doctor married to doctor with different last names, Dr. Roe and Dr. Doe. Like one of my brothers.
If I’m the sort of person who would laugh at Dr. Kissinger as being more than “slightly pompous” for it (in addition to all the other problems I have with him), and who just last week was joking with my girlfriend about some guy who was using “Dr.”, then am I allowed to laugh at people on our side who do it?
Because frankly, it IS pompous. Of course it’s pompous. Anyone who does it should expect that most normal people are laughing at them. And in particular, people who make their students (in a class of adults no less!) call them doctor should assume they’ll lose respect from most of the class for doing so.
The only problem here is the LA Times shouldn’t poking fun at someone who’s not a public servant. She wasn’t making stump speeches or anything, so I think she’s off-limits. That’s why I won’t mention her name in my post. But if I were a student of hers, I’d think she was a little bit of a buffoon.
I once had the chance to watch Henry Kissinger try to eat a crispy taco. Talk about punctured pomposity.
I always thought the ruski coinage ’samisdat’ was an interesting slightly nonparallel translation of the AppleComputer term ‘desktop publishing’ which birth about 1982, though from the perspective of a society in which access to the means of publication was a key control which in prior times had suppressed freedom of association. In the slavic language group, I would translate samisdat as selfpublished. самиздат
OT, saw in Bashmn link today a prof who may find he has opportunity to discard the title; gist: the political question leaves OLC writers vulnerable to forensics. I wonder how accurate that might be: there are three branches of the executive other than DoJ whose legal opinions served as tributaries to some of the olc material upon which the administration relied; the subject of the linked article seems to be only the nearest name in a linkage of many.
Titles are silly, so says the Lord High Hugh.
But I always assumed that Marcy was short for Marchioness.
As Joe Wilson said (in so many words), no one could have anticipated the “-ologists”…
I suspect, however, that it was Ph.D. programs which produced many of our “-ologists”…
There’s no question your doctoral subject qualified you uniquely to parse the Plame leak.
Dr. Emptywheel, indeed!
Working for a university I have plenty of people I call Doctor(PhD.) if I am meeting them for the first time. It can be first name basis later.
Madame la Comtesse de Responsabilité…que tout un lot…
Doc Wheeler sounds more like it, although it conjures up an image of a western gun moll.
My home town had a Doc Wheeler, who actually did shoot one of the Younger brothers in the Northfield, MN Raid on Jesse James’ gang.
I am not titled, however my late husband once stated his profession on our 1040 as “Lord of the Dance”. And no, he wasn’t a particularly talented dancer.
Dr. Foont is late to the party, as usual. Hey, who ate all the chips?
Lady Emptywheel?
we’ve always called stagedad, “lord stagedad”…
nice ring, eh?
he does have multiple master’s and phD’s, but says
only in academic or institutional settings is it
appropriate to call him DR. Never ever address a letter
to him with the Dr. totally wrong, says he.
maybe that’s just because he works in health policy
where there’s lots of REAL docs.
Hmm, “Dr. Mauimom” has a nice ring to it. [JD]