4.0077 Forms of Address (51)
Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Sat, 19 May 90 19:32:09 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0077. Saturday, 19 May 1990.
(1) Date: Thu, 17 May 90 17:13 PDT (9 lines)
From: KESSLER <IME9JFK@UCLAMVS.BITNET>
Subject: Re: 4.0058 Addressing Students and Others (100)
(2) Date: Fri, 18 May 90 09:27:47 EDT (20 lines)
From: Michael W Jennings <MWJENNIN@PUCC>
Subject: Re: 4.0058 Addressing Students and Others
(3) Date: Fri, 18 May 90 16:14:55 BST (22 lines)
From: DEL2%phoenix.cambridge.ac.uk@NSFnet-Relay.AC.UK
Subject: Re: [4.0065 Forms of Address (81)]
(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 17 May 90 17:13 PDT
From: KESSLER <IME9JFK@UCLAMVS.BITNET>
Subject: Re: 4.0058 Addressing Students and Others (100)
I expect to be called Mr. Some call me Professor. Some call me Dr., a
usage I f ound common out here when I came in 1961. My mother used to
laugh and asked me for my Rx for what ailed her, an allusion to my
opting out of medicine, for wha t? Poetry, believe it or not. I must
have been mad. I was. Kessler
(2) --------------------------------------------------------------28----
Date: Fri, 18 May 90 09:27:47 EDT
From: Michael W Jennings <MWJENNIN@PUCC>
Subject: Re: 4.0058 Addressing Students and Others (100)
In re: the student name game. I am faintly puzzled by the implication in
many of the submissions on this topic that students begin and remain
anonymous, distant entities. Mr. Clausing suggests that students are
neither close acquaintances nor friends. Mr. Halporn implies that
relation- ships with students are analogous to those with telephone
solicitors. I certainly don't pretend that I'm buddies with my
students, and a certain formal distance defines my relationship with
many, if not most, of the students with whom I work; in a significant
number of instances, though, I--and many of my colleagues--do form much
oser bonds with undergraduates. I am surrounded this year by a talented
and engaging group of seniors; several of them have become my friends by
any definition (American, Canadian, or European bad habits aside).
Oh, yeah. I call 'em by their first names and they call me whatever
they're most comfortable with: mostly Professor, sometimes Mr. or first
name, mercifully enough almost never Dr.
(3) --------------------------------------------------------------34----
Date: Fri, 18 May 90 16:14:55 BST
From: DEL2%phoenix.cambridge.ac.uk@NSFnet-Relay.AC.UK
Subject: Re: [4.0065 Forms of Address (81)]
It's interesting that all the contributors to the dscussion on forms of
address have concentrated exclusively on their inferiors. Have they
ever asked themselves how they would comfortably address (and be
addressed by) those who in some sense are superior in some context--the
Vice-Chancellor (or whatever the US equivalent is), the chairman of a
grants application committee, their doctors? I'd frankly rather keep
what others may think of as formality but what I prefer to offer as a
courtesy of the title-and-surname approach; at least until on other
levels we are close friends.
I remember a book in which someone mused on the absurdities of social
intercourse in rural England (perhaps no longer true) -- brought up to
address his publican as Jones and his gardener as Mr Smith, he moved to
anoher county and discovered that when he applied these conventions
there both men felt highly insulted. But I regret that I have lost the
details and the reference.
Douglas de Lacey <DEL2@PHX.CAM.AC.UK>