Small Titles and Orders
Does it matter what you call people? A week or so ago, I picked up a chummy message on my answering-machine. “Hello, Firstname”, it said, “It’s Firstname Surname here. Just a wee call, could you give me a ring back, etc……”
I was puzzled. I didn’t recognise the name, but when I checked the number it was a hospital area code. A little detective work discovered that it was indeed an NHS department ringing me about an appointment. The person addressing me so cheerily by my first name as if we were old pals was someone I have never met and don’t know. Hey-ho. Perhaps it’s old fashioned of me to feel slightly nettled by such over-familiarity and take it as disrespect rather than friendliness. I still call my patients by their titles as I was trained to do, and I suppose I shouldn’t mind being called by my first name by out-patient departments, mobile phone companies and any other public authority that has occasion to phone me. But I do mind. I find it patronising. The nuances of title and how to address people carry all sorts of subtle messages, and despite universal first-naming they are still there and can be used in all sorts of ways to convey respect and status – or the reverse.I did like Germaine Greer’s anecdote on “Grumpy Old Women” of objecting to being called “love” by a workman, who then snarled “So what should I call you then, love?” and was met with “‘Professor Greer’ will be fine.”
My late mother absolutely loathed being called by her first name by nurses and other professionals fifty years younger than herself. She was of the generation where the title “Mrs” carried considerable kudos, and those ladies who had often actively chosen not to marry took just as fierce a pride in being called “Miss”. As a young doctor I learned the hard way a few times that patients did actually mind what you called them, and also learned that if you weren’t sure it was a good idea just to ask. Unfamiliarity with non-European naming systems left us in the foolish and discourteous position of sometimes effectively addressing someone as “Mrs Mrs” until we worked out the difference between a name and a title. I once had a patient from a Middle-European country almost burst into tears because I had pronounced her surname correctly, having noticed the cedilla and understood what it meant. Her pleasure was out of all proportion to the amount of effort it had taken, and it was mostly luck. Having a slightly unusual name myself and spent a lifetime explaining to people what I’m actually called, as well as having been at school with lots of people called things like Siobhan and Mhairi and Eoghann, I perhaps have a heightened awareness of how irritating it is having to start off every interaction by either correcting the pronunciation of your name or gritting your teeth and trying not to mind when people get it wrong.
Perhaps because English no longer has the grammatical structures that delineate intimacy in the way that other European languages still do, we have to find other ways to convey that a relationship has become sufficiently close to justify the use of familiar language, and the use of first names at an early stage or even right from the beginning is how we do it. However it does not make the divisions, gradations or hierarchies go away, and in some ways it possibly makes them even more confusing. You may be on first-name terms with your boss, but it is likely that he or she will have other ways of enforcing their status than by having you call them “Sir” or “Ma’am”, and if you try to take liberties you will soon find out that all this chumminess has its limits………..
It was one of those interesting little paradoxes that the only organisation that did not address me as “Doctor” when writing to me was my NHS employer. It was another interesting paradox that the Occupational Health department wrote to male doctors as “Dr.” and female doctors as “Ms” or “Mrs.” Women will move into the majority on the medical register in 2013, so you would think that NHS departments might by now have got their heads round the idea that some of the women who work in the NHS are medically qualified. Or maybe they think we’re all surgeons? Surely they know that female surgeons are addressed as “Miss”, including obstetricians in England but not in Scotland where the O & G specialists are still called “Dr”?
Well, you can see why the temptation just to lose patience and call everyone “Fred” or “Janet” creeps in……………..who can be bothered to remember whether it’s Sir Professor or Professor Sir? As a child I was fascinated by our old dictionary that had at the back a list of the Orders of Precedence and the ways in which one should address the second wife of a third baronet’s fourth son, should one ever be called upon to do so. There are clearly still some settings in which these things are terribly important, and one visualises the minions sweating and agonising over the seating plan for the Royal Wedding and worrying over whether some obscure princelet was going to feel terribly insulted at being placed in the second row rather than the first.
I still have my place-card from our graduation dinner, and remember the thrill of seeing the handle “Dr.” in front of my name for the first time. The joke is that we are the only group allowed to call ourselves “Doctor” without actually having a doctorate, which some of our academic colleagues who are “real doctors” might feel quite irritated about. Like many new graduates, I proudly added it to my bank account, driving licence and other official paperwork – the transformation from shiftless worthless wild messy medical student into a pillar of society took a while to sink in, but I certainly noticed a sudden change in the way people treated me, which was everything to do with the title and nothing to do with the person. I realised this when I bought my first flat, and went into a posh department store to buy a fridge. I was in my usual off-duty uniform of jeans and sweatshirt, so it took a while to attract the saleslady’s attention, as I clearly did not look like the kind of customer she was expecting. I eventually managed to convey that I actually wanted to buy something, and handed over my bank card. She looked at the card, with the handle, and she looked at me………………….and then said “Is this yours?” I said in my frostiest voice that I was hardly likely to be using someone else’s. There was one of those moments as she mentally computed the difference between the scruff before her and her stereotypical expectations of what a doctor looked like, and then there was a sudden flurry of Doctor this and Doctor that and I’m so sorry Doctor I didn’t realise, etc etc…………….
At the time I thought it was funny, while feeling annoyed by her snobbery and the notion that she would treat someone differently because of what they did for a living. It was amusing to watch her expectations based on my accent and the way I was dressed undergo a sudden shift because another piece of information became available. Presumably she felt that there were certain categories of customers she could ignore and talk down to and others who were more deserving of attention. Most of the time such prejudices and assumptions are just a matter of courtesy and kindness, and the way we address people is just about manners. But it’s always good to remember that such prejudices and assumptions have the potential to harden into something really dangerous. In the dark days of apartheid in South Africa, I met a young black minister who was over visiting Scotland, and he told me about going into a shop in Glasgow where the assistant had come up to him and said “Hello, sir, can I help you?”
“I was amazed” he said, “You see, nobody had ever called me ‘sir’ before.”
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