On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 12:44 PM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 11:09 AM John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com> wrote:
The use of honorifics was subtly discouraged at the Labs.

I think this is true, or at least used to be true, everywhere between the East and California, where it was typical for tertiary students to address their teachers with the ordinary titles of Mr., Mrs., and Miss (now Ms. too, most likely). I once heard of an organization named "The Society for Calling University Professors 'Mister'".

Occasionally I teach a session of a graduate course somewhere or another; less occasionally I get emails from students who attended the lecture. I always find it flattering and amusing when they variously refer to me as "Dr" or "Prof": I am neither,

I have a standard reply to that when it comes from people who know nothing about me: "Neither doctor nor master nor even bachelor am I, but plain John of New Avalon. :-)" New Avalon is of course more usually known as the Big Apple. I use that and my middle name as my Twitter username (now long idle), @woldemar_avalon.

About half of the people in the immediate vicinity of my office have PhDs.

I have four siblings and two parents with doctorates, while I myself remain untitled (as shown above). When I was a kid and answered the phone, and someone asked for either Professor Cowan or Doctor Cowan, I would carefully ask "Do you mean Professor Thomas or Professor Marianne?" My mother wanted me to say "Do you want my mother or my father?", but I rejected this as below the dignity of a telephone receptionist.

A particular impedance mismatch is when someone has a PhD in a completely unrelated field:

Many people have advanced degrees in English (or another language) or library science but also a programming background: they tend to wind up in the digital humanities because their original fields aren't hiring.

John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org

I should say generally that that marriage was best auspiced, for the
achievement of happiness, which contemplated a relation between a man and a
woman in which the independence was equal, the dependence mutual, and the
obligations reciprocal.