This has been annoying me for awhile…and a recent visit to the hospital reminded me of the irritation.
“Doctor” should be with you in a few minutes.
I’ll go ask “doctor” for you.
I’ll schedule the followup appointment with “doctor”
“Doctor” wants to know when you had your last meal?
Hey toots, you have two choices when communicating with me about “doctor”: Refer to his/her title “the doctor”, or refer to his/her name “Dr. BigDickus”.
“The doctor” will be with you shortly. Or “Dr BigDickus” is finishing up with his other patient and will be here soon.
My wife thinks that they are just shortening up their name, by dropping the actual last name. To me, it sounds a little like baby talk… “Doctor wants to know if you’ve been having regular boom booms?”
I don’t really see this happening with other titles…
You don’t hear: “Professor is running late for his seminar”…instead “The professor is running late” or “Professor Finklestein (or Dr. Finklestein) is running late”
Is this a midwest thing, or a universal annoyance?
Nope. I don’t think it’s regional. I think it’s waaaay deeper than that.
I’ve found that the couple of aligning factors that make this happen are:
A doctor with a huge fuckin’ ego. The kind (my mom worked for one back in the day) who yells at patients, and browbeats his staff constantly so that it produces a certain type of allegiance, usually fearful.
The doctor with the huge fuckin’ ego produced staff that were not only afraid of him but revered him. Calling him “Doctor” is a morphing of the name that is sort of like weak or beaten women calling the “master” (husband, whatever) “himself” or “him”, and never referring to “him” by actual name.
I used to see this out of a couple of women my mom worked with. Not only were they the type to be super weak and deferent to almost any male figure, but that kind of deference led to this weird superiority thing among them, almost like trying constantly to be the better teacher’s pet.
My mom was miserable working for that sumbitch. Glad he’s dead.
I live on the eastern edge of the midwest, and I can’t say I’ve ever experienced this at all. I even have a son with special needs who sees doctors at least once a month, and I’ve never heard a doctor or receptionist refer to the doctor by simply “doctor.” Most often, it’s something like “Dr. Smith will be right in.” (especially in offices with multiple doctors). Occasionally in offices with only one doctor, the nurse/receptionist will refer to the doctor as “the doctor”, but never as simply “doctor.”
I am a linguist by training, so I would definitely notice something like this.
I have to admit that I don’t get, and rather resent, the whole “doctor as honorific” thing. This is someone who’s theoretically going to cut me up and rearrange my insides- if (s)he’s going to be that familiar with me, I’d prefer we be on a first-name basis, thankyewverymuch.
Why do they get a title? I mean, I’ve spent over ten years in my profession. There are a lot fewer people in the world who can do what I can do than there are doctors. When do I get my title?
Do they get it because they “earned it”? Hell, I delivered a hell of a lot of pizza to get where I am today.
Do they get it to maintain an aura of professionalism? Why would they need it? Besides, calling someone “Dr. So-and-so” doesn’t inspire awe in me- it just makes me resent the extra two syllables.
This has been bugging me for YEARS except my particular bete noir is: “We bought it for baby.” or, “Baby is one year old today.”
Drives me nucking futz! PLEASE either use an article with ‘baby’ (“a baby”, “the baby”) or a possessive (“my baby”, “their baby”), or SOMETHING other than just “baby”.
I’ve never bitched about this because other folks don’t seem to have any problem with it. But everyone here is pretty much agreeing with you on the asinine use or “Doctor” by itself (needless to say, I concur, BTW).
What’s the difference? They BOTH sound pretty silly to me.
I work in biology, in the basic sciences. As such, probably 75% of my collegues have doctorates. Addressing each other as “doctor” be both silly and redundant, and it would probably piss off the techs. Pissing off techs is a fine way to make your experiments spontaneously stop working. So I’ve been addressed as “doctor” maybe a half-dozen times in my professional life.
Last year, I went on jury duty. During the voir dire, we each had to answer a set of standard questions - name, where we lived, highest level of educational achievement, etc…, which the lawyers wrote down. The juror (male) next to me had an M.D, and I (female) have a Ph. D. The judge didn’t give a rat’s ass and called all of us Mr./Ms., which I thought was totally appropriate.
The lawyers, however, consistently addressed the guy next to me as “Dr. Doofus” and me as “Ms. Mischievous”. After about the third round of questioning, I got annoyed by the discrepancy and corrected one of the lawyers - “That’s Dr. Mischievous, please.” He looked at me like I had burned his puppy and went scurrying back to his notes, horrified. He asked me no further questions.
The odd part was, Dr. Doofus got kicked out of the jury pool, and I ended up on the jury. I thought for sure that being a pretentious brat to one of the lawyers would get me removed.
Now I have no idea if the difference in address was due to Dr. Doofus being male and me being female, or if it was because Dr. Doofus looks like a psychiatrist (which he was) and I look like a goth chick (which I am), or if the various lawyers simply hadn’t processed that both Ph. D.s and M. D.s are properly addressed as “Dr.”. Frankly, I don’t really care, because that was the one and only time I’ve asked to be addressed with a formal title and I’ll never see those people again. It’s just my little anecdote regarding the incorrect usage of “Dr.”
Personally, I insist on being called “Dr. BigDickus”.
I’ve never heard anyone just use “Doctor” like this in my clinic or my hospital. With patients it’s always either “the doctor” or my name, and among the staff it’s either my last name by itself (which a lot of people call me anyway, for some reason) or “Doc”.
I’m sure I’ll hear it all the time now that you’ve pointed it out.
I think I may have cracked this one. I was told by my PCPs office receptionist that “Doctor will call you back in about twnety minutes.” I had asked to speak with Dr B, my PCP. When I get the call, it’s Dr H, one of his partners. The reason they don’t use a name is because they don’t know which doctor they’re talking about. The reason they don’t say “the” is because they don’t know who it will be, so a definite article is inappropriate. The reason they don’t say “a” is because then you would realize they don’t know which doctor will be with you shortly, which calls into question how they can know that any doctor will be with you at all.
I’ve heard this usage (“Doctor” without any article) in my line of work, though I have never used it myself. Hell if I know why they’re using it, and it annoys the hell out of me. I always say “Dr. So-and-so” or “the doctor” or “one of the doctors”, never “Doctor will call you back” or “Doctor isn’t in.”
I dunno, but I noticed recently a young man in my hometown using the “go to hospital” construction. Now, if I do that, it’s because I was a pretentious Anglophile at a young age.
But some random kid in Southwestern Missouri? Weird. (Which is exactly what people used to say about me.)
We don’t seem to have this problem by me. The Doctors are refered to as Dr. Lastname. “Dr. *Lastname * will be in shortly.”
The Op has me thinking of Steve Martin in “Little Shop of Horrors”.
I have noticed this with a few other titles or nouns as well. And yes, I find it VERY annoying, more of that dumbing down of America.
The one that’s getting me these days is the use of “in hospital” for in THE hospital". I understand that “in hospital” is a common phrase in the UK, but we are not IN the UK.
It’s either very pretend-yish and pretentious on the parts of our newscasters and they’re trying to sound British, or it’s just more of the general dumbing down and "who cares what the word really means, let’s change the language, after all language is meant to change…blah de blah (nauseous for mauseAted…grrrrrrrrrrrrrr, don’t get me started on the misappropriation of that perfectly good word…).
Anyway, sorry lost track there…
I agree with you wholeheartedly, it sounds stupid and it IS stupid. Next the word grapefruit will really mean lamp. and people will get all annoyed and huffy and state “language is MEANT to change and evolve…blah de blah”.
