Keith’s Conundrums: What is the Title of this Post?

Recap

Last time I honoured the life and friendship of a good friend. “Semper fi” Alex responded to this column by also honouring. Thank you, Alex, for your continued participation. (For those who look up or know the meaning of the Latin – this is a joke. 😊)

What’s on for this month?

I started writing this on March 17, 2025. This is commonly called in these parts of the world “Saint Patrick’s Day” – a day associated with the Irish and all matter of things green. I would like to take up a theme from the name – titles. The following is a series of reflection and puzzles about personal (human, mostly) titles.

Who now?

Ever since I realized I was in no sense a Christian, I have wondered about titles given to Christian (and then later, those of other religions) figures for their importance. The “saint” that I started with above is one example: we also have “father”, “mother”, “brother”, “sister”, “your holiness”, “christ” (Word’s autocorrect wants me to capitalize that one), “god” (maybe), etc. A problem one might have here is that the titles are bestowed purely as honorifics in an area where one does not believe that one should be honoured. I also learned later that even “Jesus” is the English rendering of a Greek version of a Hebrew name but could also be taken as a title, since “Yeshua” does mean something like “god saves”.  But then again, this applies to a lot of names. “Michael” is my favourite here since I understand it is read as a question. Yet we couldn’t well (if we want to play with the Irish today) simply say “Patrick’s Day” – that’s not nearly specific enough. So, at least, “saint” does (nominally) allow us to be more precise). But there are of course sometimes overlapping names, even for saints. I also find it interesting that the biological relative titles used in Christianity also get used in some branches of Buddhism. How literal is this in the case of, say, Vietnamese Buddhism? I have no idea. Needless to say some uses of the religious titles also get used in (semi-?)secular contexts as well, in reverse. 1980s-1990s Montreal area hockey fans may remember another “St. Patrick” associated with a different sort of shrine – the Forum … So if I understand this correctly: we honour our relatives by giving them a title; this then gets borrowed into the religious domain to “borrow the honour” and then from the religious use to the sports one because in Montreal sometimes hockey has come to replace the church …

Maybe …

… I don’t recognize the accomplishments that result in “sainthood” (Patrick Roy notwithstanding). But if that were so (which isn’t necessarily a complete counterargument), I would have to second guess honorary doctorates. My sister (who has an earned one) sometimes finds that they demean her accomplishments. This is interesting in light of ones awarded for non-academic areas, where presumably the accomplishments are simply different. On the other hand, in the academic case, consider Saul Kripke, the famous philosopher who died in 2022. Kripke’s only earned degree was a BS in mathematics. Because of his importance to the field(s) he contributed to, recognizing that after the fact might have been okay. (On the other hand, he was very reluctant to publish, so his traditional output is also unusual.)

But if earning a title is important, how do some of the most common titles of all in the English speaking work: “Mr.”, “Miss”, “Mrs.”, “Ms.” (those in the know historically will know I omitted one). “Miss” is especially troublesome – even if one acknowledges de Beauvoir’s “one is not born a woman, one becomes one”, one still does not accomplish anything other than existing to use “Miss”. 

There’s another problem, again stemming from religion. Consider “rabbi”. People speak of “rabbi so-and-so”, but also that so-and-so is a rabbi, whereas it would be very odd to say that I am a “Mr.” (except to correct my pronouns, etc.). So it is both a job and a title?

Master

This is (perhaps in part) used as a title, and an earned academic one. Originally, it was related to what teaching responsibilities were appropriate (“doctor” being the stronger version). But it is also, historically (at least), used the way “Miss” is still (sometimes) used – this time of a male under the age of majority (or the like). This one is also unusual in my case – I am twice an academic master, even if I am not any longer a sociopolitical one. Please do not call me “Master Master Douglas”, though in some sense legally or morally you could. People make a joke of this, sometimes, especially around people with more than one doctorate. 

Doctor

“Doctor” is now often used (to the annoyance of people like my sister and Professor Bunge) to mean “medical doctor”. Bunge told the story of how when he first took his job at McGill he thought it would be a good idea to go to the university health clinic and get a physical. He called them up and told them that Dr. Bunge wanted to schedule an appointment as a new faculty member. The reception asked him out of curiosity what his speciality was and he said, “Theoretical physics and the philosophy of science” (which seems accurate for the time period in his career, in retrospect, to me). “Oh, then, Mr. Bunge” (emphasis in original). He found this insulting – but he told this story in the context of him self-debating whether to bother accepting another honorary doctorate. Lesson: not all titles that sound the same are at least subjectively the same! 

On the other hand, some people find the title pretentious (I’ve always thought so, but I’ve seen how useful it is for my sister to have one even when helping my parents as my father dies, etc.!) – my father did, for example. He put it up on his office door at the pharmaceutical company where he spent most of his career – but under duress. I asked him why, given what I knew of his preference. Apparently his (American) bosses liked bragging about how many graduate level chemists they had – a way to demonstrate to the shareholders, etc. how serious they were about doing the right thing – or something like that. How the shareholders would visit a small pilot plant in Canada, I have no idea.

Mrs.

Notice how one has to earn (so to say) this one, and not Mr. – No wonder people eventually regarded at least some aspects of it as sexist. The traditions on when to use it are variegated even in the English speaking world where this version of a common European tradition originates. My favourite episode of The Golden Girls is called (rarely seen at the time of airing, but it appears later on episode lists and would have appeared in some TV guides  – perhaps even TV Guide) “Mrs. George Deveraux”. This is of course using the names of Blanche’s late husband, but with the feminine title. In some places and times, this is the way one would sometimes address a married woman. (In the episode Blanche even says the line.) Suppose counterfactually you regard this practice as sexist back in the day and want to change it. In “our world” the practice disappeared (largely); would it have been acceptable also to simply do the reverse? Could Blanche’s husband have become known as Mr. Blanche Hollingsworth? 

Miss vs. Ms.

As a child in elementary and pre-school I found it confusing that some teachers were (written as to pronunciation) “Miss so-and-so” and some were “Miz so-and-so”. This was the first time I had used these titles; my earliest friend’s mothers got called “aunts” by my mother earlier than I can remember. This is a repurposing of a biological title, needless to say, something also found in religion. Are there any religions where a cleric is called “Uncle X” or “Aunt Y”? Maybe a fictional example – (then) Lt. Commander (military title! – that raises questions of “earned, deserving, etc. too!) Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5  addresses a rabbi from her childhood as “Uncle Yossel”, with no real implication that he is a biological uncle (he’s Rabbi Koslov to other characters, however). The “miss” vs “miz” case has another aspect beyond the fact that “miz” is abbreviated to the same as the title that they are avoiding – namely the difference in traditions about address. In some schools, one would not even use the name here. In others (all in Montreal area in the 1980s!) the given name of the teacher would be used. This came to a head in CEGEP where I had four English teachers, as is typical in the English sector. One wanted to be called “Dr. Islam” (where Islam here is a name, of course) and one was just “Pat”. What a contrast!

Translation

Should one translate titles? This can be trickier than it sounds. Dr. Islam was a specialist in English literature or the like, so his degree was presumably at least originally sorta in English (the “PhD” is effectively English, even if it abbreviates “Philosophiae Doctor” originally (or perhaps currently)? Yet not all places grant degrees with names like used in many English speaking contexts. One of my professors in the McGill philosophy department had several degrees from U of T, but since one was granted by a theological institute it was an STB. Should one translate that? Should one try to map it onto something “usual”? One of the problems is the level. This is a “second bachelors” done in theological contexts, so parallel to the LLB/BCL from law, which is usually a “professional” degree like the MBA? But then we have professional first bachelors – of medicine no less – at English universities. I used to joke that I have more education than John Locke (MB) and equivalent (despite me having two) to Newton and Darwin (MA). Note here the “M” in Locke’s title is the “medicine” – or would be in English and the “M” in my, Darwin and Newton’s case is the “Master” we talked about earlier. 

Ordering and redundancy and …

In German speaking contexts one can use 3 titles in a way that would be regarded as redundant here: “Herr Professor Doktor” is sometimes still heard (at UBC one of the faculty in my department was called that as a joke by some undergraduates, given his Germanisms – despite being as far as I know a several generations-American). It sounds odd if taken naively literally. Why would one start with “Herr”? Isn’t that like saying “Mr.” first? Not exactly – my German is pretty lousy, but from what I understand this is similar in usage to that in Einstein’s famous saying: “Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht”¹. The usual translation of that begins “Subtle is the lord, …” I understand then that “Herr” has overtones of “sir”, where this is not taken to be that of a knight’s title. Some of my classmates called our CEGEP biology instructor Dudley Nash “sir”, and being the Brit he was, retorted: “’Sir?’ I work for a living!” I suspect he would have made a similar remark if he’d be addressed as “Dr. Nash”. Regardless, then, I suspect that “Herr” comes first, because politics and power outrank academic achievement. “Professor” and “Doktor” are usually redundant; in fact one has to traditionally write another recognized work before being granted the former, often described as a “second dissertation”– the Habilitationsschrift. I am not drawing attention merely to the fact that there is another level of title, but that the convention has often been to include both. Note what was translated as “Lord”, which always struck me as strange, given the compound. English does use “Lord” as a divine title, but also a human one – a political one, as in “Lord Stanley”, of cup fame. The cultural differences here are interesting in reverse. Leibniz famously called Francis Bacon “Verulam” as if it were a name. Maybe; Leibniz was a diplomat, at least sort of, so maybe this was the way to do it? But notice that Verulam is a place (sort of), and it came with “Baron”. Sometimes titles are thus “compound”. A classmate and I had fun with the fact that in the 17^th century, nobody (the guy himself included) could seemingly make up their mind over the spelling of “Descartes” – was it “Des Cartes”? The (literally) “of …” here was used in various places – you could say you’re from somewhere if you’re someone special (though Descartes pere was simply educated and a civil servant – he was not really nobility). In “Verulam”’s case, the “of …” is usually elided.

Science fiction

I already gave a science fiction example using familiar titles. But this is one area where I imagine a galaxy-spanning civilization would have tremendous difficulty. Isn’t the joke that Mr. Spock should really be Dr. Spock, if it weren’t for the pediatrician? Scientific doctorates are found on the original Trek, e.g., Dr. Daystrom of computing fame. So maybe Spock is just modest, like my dad was? Or Vulcans live so long and by mind that something as “simple” as a single advanced degree isn’t worth honouring? What sort of accomplishments matter when there are presumably 100s of billions of people? How does one control for age? If an intelligent creature lives a year, how does he finish even elementary school? How do the Trill handle degrees once joined? An early Deep Space 9 emphasizes that young (?) Jadzia has earned academic titles before her symbiont is added, but what if she earns one while joined? Phew, I am glad I don’t have to worry about that! 😊

Honour

Thank you, for honouring this writer’s desire to discuss something strange, regardless of my titles, and happy Green Day (in retrospect) … wait, that doesn’t work either …

1. “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not” ↩︎