Well, if you won’t accept wild speculation as evidence, just what the hell will you accept?
Would you accept distorted and exaggerated personal anecdotes?
I don’t buy this. If any doctor, MD or PhD, is at a party or other social situation asking to be called “doctor”, I (and I would imagine most people) would be more likely to call him “douchebag”.
I’m a PhD who has a lab that does clinical research. In the hospital, I am usually initially called “doctor”, and I make it a point to have people call me by my first name instead. I don’t really care what the MDs do, though they’re all called “doctor”, which I find silly. But that’s their world, and they can do what they want.
MDs end up interning in my lab a lot, and they are, whether they like it or not, called by their first names like everyone else, including myself. As far as I’m concerned, I earn the respect of my peers by what I do every day, and I can’t demand respect by requiring people to use an honorific. No one has ever balked at it. Particularly because, in a lab setting, an MD is as useful as my PhD is in a surgical suite.
MD meetings are funny as hell cause they still refer to each other as “doctor smith” even if they are friends. Also, you don’t have to wear your scrubs on the subway, or your white coat to a meeting or your stethoscope around your neck in the cafeteria. It’s all right if not everyone knows you’re a doctor!
Do you have any evidence that this is the procedure that airlines use? I simply do not believe that the air crew looks to see what honorific a passenger has chosen when purchasing his or her ticket. It sounds like something from an Encyclopedia Brown story.
Yuk yuk.
You don’t have to imagine this scenario occurring - I mentioned it in a previous post (for the record, it was a diabetic whose blood sugar got a bit low, and I volunteered to help while letting the cabin attendant know what my specialty was and the likelihood that other medical personnel if available might be better suited for the task - though it turned out none were declaring themselves if they were there.
And for the record, virtually all pathologists (apart from forensic pathologists and some academic types) spend 99.99% or better of their time dealing with living patients, and some even see those patients in person (i.e. blood bank/plasmapheresis docs, cytopathologists who perform fine needle aspirates etc.).
Off the soapbox for now.
Traditionally a ship’s cook was called the “doctor” or “doc” for short. I have seen several origins proposed for this, because he doctors the food, because he has knives, etc.
At any rate it seems quite clear to me an airline could not care less what honorific a passenger chooses or they would say so in their web site when you buy a ticket. It seems to me they leave it to the preference of the customer.
Firstname Firstlastname (Secondlastname, this field being optional).
Except for something like a letter to the government, which has to follow a specific format, honorifics are rare.
For something formal and where you don’t know whether the recipient has some special honorific, nowadays everybody gets the Don/Doña - but it sounds very formal, it would be seen on something from a court or law or other branhc of the government much more often than for something from a commercial company.
Please note that this is usage in Spain, there’s places where the Don/Doña is more common.
You only adress someone by a work-related title if you’re writing to them at work. My SiL never uses Dr except at work, etc.
I concur.
Some defense trial lawyers refer to “Chiropractor Smith” instead of “Dr. Smith” for this very reason.
I wonder how the OP would deal with a British surgeon: despite being fully qualified doctors, the male ones call themselves Mister.
There are also defense trial lawyers who call Dr. Smith “Mr. Smith” just to see if they can get a rise out of them over the lack of respect. If they get all huffy and make a deal about their degree, it makes them look like pricks in front of the jury.
How often do you think there’s a need for surgeons on an airplane?
You concur with what? That airlines use the “title” field of ticket purchases to identify providers of emergency medical assistance? Do you have any reason to believe that this is true?
I think he’s just trying to talk like a doctor. Y’know, like that scene in Catch Me If You Can.
“I blew it, didn’t I? Why didn’t I concur?”
This is conflating two different meanings of “social”. Using an honorific “socially” doesn’t only mean using it while socializing at a party or something. It means using it in all contexts that aren’t directly related to your profession or job.
When an M.D. is called “Doctor” in the hospital, or when a postdoc researcher is addressed as “Doctor” on interdepartmental memos, they’re using their title professionally. If they use “Doctor” as part of their home return address on personal-business mail, say, or check off “Doctor” as their honorific when making airline reservations for personal travel, they are using their title socially.
Technically, the latter practice is correct etiquette for M.D.'s, but not for Ph.D.'s. If you don’t like that double standard (and I agree that it’s a completely arbitrary artifact of historical practices), then argue the point with Miss Manners. But the fact is that the existence of this arbitrary but widely recognized convention means that many people consider Ph.D.'s who expect to be addressed as “Doctor” anywhere except in job-related situations to be somewhat ignorant or “pretentious”.
You don’t have to give a rat’s ass about that fact, of course, and I certainly am not defending it as meaningful or sensible. But it is something to be aware of.
Is it an “arbitrary artifact of historical practice,” or is it “technically” correct? Because those things appear to be mutually exclusive.
There is nothing technical about arbitrary historical etiquette. It is precisely missing the point to refer to something like this as “technically correct.”
In fact, because people with a Ph.D. do, in fact, hold a Doctorate, it is actually technically correct to call them Doctor. You might be right that leaving off this honorific has become an arbitrary historical practice, but it’s not technically incorrect for a Ph.D. to use the term Doctor in the social settings you describe.
As far as I can tell, Miss Manners is not enthusiastic about M.D.'s being socialy termed “Doctor” either. Damn egalitarian that she is.
Having your academic suffix behind your name, on a business card or check is fine, but putting Doctor or Dr before the name is just plain wrong. It would be like putting Mr or Ms there, which is also inconsistent with proper form. It’s equally incorrect for medical doctors as it is for history professors.
With regard to academics, I wasn’t aware that professors still ever used their titles socially. When I was attending UCSD in the late 1970s, we would normally address our professors directly as Doctor Lastname, and refer to them as such, but the word Professor as a form of direct address was almost unheard of. Aside from this, the official class schedule was so assertively egalitarian that they called all the instructors Mr. and Ms. regardless of academic rank or degree.
Personally, I find the whole thing silly either socially or professionally. (I think I started a thread about it years and years ago and got roundly housed). If anyone, MD or PhD, expects me to address my Christmas cards to “doctor so and so”, then they’re off the list! If we’ve gotten to the point of being in a social situation, whatever that means, and you haven’t said, “call me by my first name”, then you’re kind of being a pretentious ass. I will always start with calling someone “doctor”, nomatter what, but I expect to be corrected and I think less of someone who doesn’t ask to be called by their first name.
Where it rubs my ass is when we have meetings of MDs and PhDs, and these are more research related meetings, and the MDs want to be addressed as “doctor” but don’t extend the courtesy. If anything, in my lab meetings (which would be a professional setting for a PhD, but not an MD) it should be reversed, except that I institute a first name only rule across the board. (It’s less of a rule than an obvious shunning)
Honorifics have their place, and I think it’s largely between adults and children. Teachers should be called “mister” or “doctor” by the children in their class because it sets up a hierarchy that must exist for that class to work. Once you’ve reached adulthood, you shouldn’t be instituting that hierarchy, but rather you should earn that hierarchy.
Social situation or in my lab, “Doctor Five Yearlurker” goes by “Five”, and so does everyone else around me!
Most of them don’t at least not among those that i know in the humanities fields. Most consider it pretentious in the extreme.
This depends on the school, and sometimes on the individual professor. It’s certainly more common to use formal terms of address (Doctor, Professor) in American universities than in, say, Australia or the UK. When i was an undergrad in Australia, i always called all my instructors by their first name. But when i came to the US for grad school, to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the undergrads almost always used “Professor,” and most professors did nothing to discourage this formal mode of address.
Among my friends who now teach at universities, some expect students to use Professor or Doctor, while others are happy with first names. In my relatively small sample size, i’ve met more women than men who insist on the honorific from their students. I think this comes, in part, from the fact that young women professors sometimes find it more difficult to gain respect from male students. I’ve had women academics tell me that they only insist on being called Professor because it gives them a level of professional formality and deference that might otherwise be missing from some students.