American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  Optometric education may be divided into two distinct types of institutions. The first type includes Columbia, Ohio State and California universities. These offer a standard four-years course, based on a high-school training, which course leads to the degree of B.S. or B.A. None of these standard institutions recognizes the “doctorate” in optometry either by granting the degree or by indicating that the degree is held by a member of the faculty. On the other hand, the second type of schools, privately owned and actually conducted for profit (although frequently chartered “not for profit”), grants the doctorate on less work than is required for graduation from a good junior college. An official of one of the Chicago optometric colleges recently boasted that the Chicago schools receive a good many students from California because they give the “doctorate” while the students’ own State university grants merely a bachelor’s degree.

  Dr. Juchhoff added that some of the schools of chiropody3 are almost as bad as the worst of those of optometry. In both fields, he reported, there is a tendency among the more ambitious schools to extend their courses to include “practically all the subjects in the regular medical curriculum,” with the aim of permitting graduates to prescribe for disease — something which is now forbidden, as I note below, by the State licensing acts. “The plan,” he said, “appears to be to convert these schools into medical schools granting the M.D. degree, first by calling it M.D. in Optometry or M.D. in Chiropody, and then making it straight M.D.” He went on:

  It is probably only a question of time until some bright mind will conceive the idea of purchasing from the State of Illinois a charter for a college of barbering and beauty culture and of granting a “doctorate” to its graduates. That such a plan would be quite profitable seems certain. The barbers would have in their favor, at least, some historical basis. The various functions of the beauty culturist, such as massage, application of electricity to the hair and face, the puncturing and squeezing of pimples and extraction of blackheads, certainly are as much “doctoring” as removing corns, extracting ingrown toe nails and massaging fallen arches.

  The colleges of osteopathy and chiropractic all offer doctorates to their graduates, and in addition some of them also offer other degrees. An osteopath1 on taking his diploma becomes a D.O. (doctor of osteopathy), but may advance to the degrees of D.O.S. (doctor of osteopathic science) and D.L.O. (doctor of laws in osteopathy).2 A chiropractor becomes a D.C. (doctor of chiropractic) and then advances to Ph.C. (philosopher of chiropractic).3 All the other non-Euclidian healers have similar degrees.4 Graduates in naturopathy5 become D.N.’s, and those in “divine science,” which seems to be a variety of faith healing, may choose between the degrees of Ps.D. (doctor of psychology), Psy.D. (doctor of psychotherapy), and D.S.D. (doctor of divine science).6 The tendency to multiply degrees has been marked in the United States since the turn of the century. The degrees of bachelor, master and doctor are now often followed by designations of particularity, e.g., in Ed. (education), in Eng. (engineering), in Mus. (music), etc. These distinctions are needed, lest the sheer multitudinousness of new bachelors, masters and doctors reduce them to an undifferentiated horde.1

  Columbia University and its various outhouses, during the academic year 1943–44, conferred no less than 3455 degrees, certificates and diplomas on 3442 individuals,2 and all the other great rolling-mills of learning followed suit. How many Ph.D.’s are turned out in the United States every year I do not know, but the number must run to thousands.3 This degree was borrowed from the Germans, and was almost unheard of in American colleges before the great influx of German ideas in the 70s and 80s. The English universities did not adopt it until after World War I. They are much less liberal than the American universities with honorary degrees, which are distributed lavishly in the United States, especially the LL.D. The champion degree-bearer of all times seems to be the Hon. Herbert C. Hoover, who got his A.B. in Eng. at Leland Stanford in 1895 by the sweat of his brow and has since accumulated 49 honorary degrees of various sorts, chiefly LL.D.’s. His runner up is Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia, who is A.B., A.M. and Ph.D. by honest toil and has received 37 degrees honoris causa. There are few members of Congress without at least one LL.D., and few other politicos of any puissance. It is also conferred wholesale upon the presidents and other high officers of rich corporations, newspaper editors and columnists, eminent radio crooners, college presidents who may be trusted to reciprocate, and a miscellaneous rabble of contributors or potential contributors to college funds.

  The misuse of professor began in America at an early date, and still prevails. The DAE records a professor of book-auctioneering in 1774, and Bartlett, in 1859, noted the use of the term to designate “dancing-masters, conjurors, banjo-players, etc.” It has been applied, first and last, to a really immense range of virtuosi, mainly frauds. Said an anonymous contributor to American Speech in 1927:1

  Most of those who insist on being given the title of professor are quacks or fakers of some kind, or they are chiropractors, or chiropodists, or tonsorial experts, or boxing instructors, or they are men teachers in secondary schools. In the United States the word has no aura of dignity, whatever standing it may retain across the Atlantic Ocean. I have an official right to the title myself, but like other academic bearers of it I much prefer to be termed merely Mr.

  Two years before this the professors at the University of Virginia organized a society “for the encouragement of the use of Mister to all men, professional or otherwise,” and during the years since then its crusade has made such progress that most genuine professors now prefer to be called Mister, and that term is in wide use in the larger colleges.2 But Professor is still cherished by pedagogues on the lower levels, and not long ago, according to a writer in American Speech, “a man who taught the fifth and sixth grades in Byers, Kansas, threatened to lick the children if they did not call him professor.”3 There was a time when every county superintendent of schools and high-school principal was a professor by unanimous local consent, but of late years so many of these birchmen have been made Ph.D.’s that they are now usually called doctor, even when they are not.4 In the Baltimore of my boyhood, c. 1890, the following, inter alia, were called professors: colored hostlers who bit off the tails of puppies, bootblacks serving in barber-shops, rubbers of baseball-players, tattooers, Indian-club swingers, painters of black eyes, owners and operators of rat terriers, and distinguished crab-soup and oyster-flitter cooks. During Prohibition days the functionary who went about reinforcing near-beer with shots of alcohol or ether was first called a professor, but after a while, for some reason unknown, his designation was changed to doctor. Professor is not altogether unknown in England in the extended American sense. The NED records a protest, dated 1864, against its use “in connection with dancing schools, jugglers’ booths, and veterinary surgeries,” and shows that it was used in 1893 by a champion high-diver. An English correspondent tells me that he has observed its use by the proprietor of a Punch-and-Judy show, and adds that in the New Statesman and Nation, in 1939,1 G. W. Stonier spoke of “Professor Morley’s select bathing-tents” at Brighton. But the English treat genuine professors much more politely than we do. In writing, the title takes precedence of all other titles, but in conversation it may be dropped, e.g., Professor Sir Alfred Zimmern and Sir Alfred Zimmern.2 The following additional notes on British university degrees and dignities come from an academic correspondent:

  At Oxford the degree of D.D. used to be given to any divine of the Church of England who published three sermons at his own expense and paid a fee. But some years ago, when the Faculty of Divinity was made non-Anglican, i.e., when any Christian clergyman was admitted to degrees, the regulations for the grant of the D.D. were tightened, and a candidate must now take a serious examination.

  Every university in the British Isles has a chancellor who is its nominal head, but in nearly all of them the real head, corresponding to the American university president, is the vice-chancellor. In the Scottish un
iversities the office of vice-chancellor is combined with that of principal, a permanent official of lower rank, in actual charge of the administration. At the University of London there is a vice-chancellor as well as a principal, and at Dublin there is a provost as well as a vice-chancellor. The vice-chancellor, at Oxford, Cambridge and London, is a head of one of the constituent colleges, and commonly serves for three years.

  At St. Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen the principal is appointed by the Crown; at Edinburgh, which was originally a municipal foundation, he is elected by a committee representing the City Council and the university. At Dublin the provost is appointed by the heir of the Crown, i.e., the president of the Irish Free State. In all other universities the chancellors, vice-chancellors, etc., are elected by the alumni. At Oxford there is a system of rotation, whereby the head of Beelzebub College is sure to be chancellor when his college’s turn comes. At Cambridge there is slightly more choice, but not much. At the Scotch universities there is, in addition to the chancellor, another honorary head, the lord rector. He is elected by the students, who lose their right to vote when they are graduated.

  A regius professor is appointed by the Crown, i.e., in England by the Prime Minister and in Scotland by the Secretary of State for Scotland, but it does not necessarily follow that the Crown has endowed his chair. All B.A.’s of a university have the right to vote in parliamentary elections; if they have residence elsewhere they may vote twice. But at Oxford and Cambridge only M.A.’s have any voice in university affairs. Both grant the degree as a matter of course after a lapse of time and the payment of a fee, but at the other universities it is given only after an examination or the submission of a thesis.

  At Oxford and Cambridge the faculty is called the dons; elsewhere it is the staff. Dons are the fellows of colleges, and are their own employers, for there are no outside trustees. There are many junior teachers at Oxford and Cambridge who are not fellows, but they all hope to be elected. At both universities all professors are attached to colleges, and at Oxford a college must accept as a fellow anyone appointed to a chair. At Cambridge this is not necessary, and some professors are thus not fellows. There are fellows who do not aspire to professorships, for if they become heads of their colleges they may have more power and more money than if they became professors.

  The introduction of the Ph.D. degree into Great Britain has caused some perturbation in the older universities, the statutes of which give all doctors precedence of M.A.’s, no matter what the college or university rank of the latter. In the old days this did not matter, for the doctors were bound to be senior people anyway, and most heads of colleges were D.Litt.’s or D.D.’s. But nowadays hardly any clerics are heads of colleges, and many of the heads are not doctors. (As in American colleges they tend to be administrators rather than scholars.) Meanwhile, a good many younger dons have become Ph.D.’s, and they take great pleasure in asserting their doctoral rights. Sooner or later the heads of colleges will have to be treated like bishops and made doctors regardless of their academic claims.1

  Read, in the paper before cited, and the DAE, under the appropriate rubrics, assemble many comments of early English travelers upon the fondness for military titles in America. “Whenever you travel in Maryland (as also in Virginia and Carolina),” wrote Edward Kimber in 1746,1 “your ears are constantly astonished by the number of colonels, majors and captains that you hear mentioned; in short, the whole country seems at first to you a retreat of heroes.” Two years before this a Scottish physician, Alexander Hamilton, found colonels so thick along the Hudson that he recorded a common saying that any man who had killed a rattlesnake was entitled to the title.2 After the Revolution there was a great increase in these titles, for any veteran of respectable position — say, an innkeeper — was commonly called captain, and all actual officers continued to use their titles, usually with an informal promotion of a rank or two. Every other American war, even the most trivial, brought in a horde of other such brevet holders of imaginary commissions, and during the great movement into the West they were multiplied enormously. “Every man who comes from Georgia,” said a writer in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1852, “is a major!” But major was never as popular as captain and colonel. The former got a great lift when, on the coming of railways, it began to be applied to conductors, and the latter was assisted when the Governors of the States began appointing large and glittering staffs, some of whom were made generals but most of whom were colonels.3 How many such bogus colonels were commissioned first and last I do not know, but the number must have run to many thousands. The late Ruby Laffoon, during his glorious reign as Governor of Kentucky (1931–35),4 bestowed the silver eagle on whole brigades, divisions and army corps of them, and so helped to give the term Kentucky colonel a reinforced validity.5 Some of the Governors of other militaristic States, despairing of beating him at this game, turned to other titles, and one of them actually began making admirals. One of the most conspicuous Kentucky colonels of the between-war era, Colonel Patrick H. Callahan of Louisville (1866–1940), who had served in that rank on the staffs of two Kentucky Governors, was a stout defender of the title. In 1934 or thereabout he thus wrote to John A. Doyle, of River Forest, Ill., who had criticized Governor Laffoon’s great spate of colonels:

  Colonel [in Kentucky] is not much more than a nickname, like Tom, Dick or Harry, and is used and appreciated mostly on that account. It is often applied to all Kentuckians without the formality of an appointment, just as major is used in Georgia. Nine out of ten people who call me colonel otherwise would be saying Mr. Callahan. It is a handle that breaks down formality.

  To another correspondent, John D. Moore, of Brooklyn, N. Y., he wrote in 1935:

  The names of Pat and Mike were used so much by slapstick comedians and bum story-tellers that my friends and even chums had some hesitancy in addressing me as Pat, although when I played ball as a young fellow I was addressed in no other way.… When one is given a title like colonel or judge it is a middle ground, and where people would hesitate to call one by his given name it is just the thing to use the title.1

  When the late Milton McRae was offered an appointment on the staff of William McKinley, then Governor of Ohio, and refused it, it was bestowed upon him nevertheless by his fellow journalists, and in the end he bore it proudly.2 In all probability he would have got it soon or late, even without the suggestion of McKinley, for it is often bestowed on American newspaper editors by common consent, as a sort of occupational honorific, especially in the South. In the Middle West it is similarly given to auctioneers. Said E. L. Jacobs in American Speech in 1935:

  The title of colonel is as punctiliously accorded all auctioneers in small towns and in the country as the title of professor is given to all principals of high-schools.1

  A number of American Governors, in order to put down the pestilence of colonels, have declined to appoint honorary military staffs: in this reform, I believe, the late Albert Cabell Ritchie (1876–1936), Governor of Maryland from 1920 to 1935, was the pioneer. In Virginia, in 1942, a member of the Legislature named Pilcher lent a hand by introducing a bill providing that upon the payment of one dollar any adult white citizen of the State should become a colonel.2 The English historian, Edward A. Freeman, who made a lecture tour of the United States in 1881–82, reported when he got home that at that time, at least in parts of the United States, any stranger not obviously of inferior status was “commonly addressed as colonel or judge.”3 Another English visitor of the 80s, W. G. Marshall, thus reported his own adventures:4

  The hotel runners at Ogden called me Boss, and my friend they called Cap’n. Hitherto I had generally been known as Colonel, particularly among the Negroes. I rather approved of being called by this latter appellation. “To call a man Colonel,” says the Philadelphia Post, “is to convey the idea that he is of a mild, meek and benevolent disposition.” … But it is another matter altogether, indeed it is beyond a joke, when a letter comes addressed to you with some bogus title appended to y
our name on the envelope, or when the newspapers take you up and proclaim your name with a like spurious title attached to it, thereby causing you to become a laughing-stock to your friends. During my visit to the United States I was twice dubbed a Right Hon. (by letter), thrice was I knighted (in the newspapers), and once I was addressed (by letter) as colonel. In the arrival-list of guests staying at the Massasoit House, Narragansett Pier (a seaside resort on Rhode Island), on August 10, 1879, I found myself figuring prominently as the Right Honorable, etc.1

  Judge seems to have come into courtesy use relatively late, for the first example given by Read, in the paper before cited, is from John Maud’s diary for July 27, 1800.2 Before this the lawyers of the colonies and the new Republic were apparently content with esquire. But when the great march to the West got under way judges began to proliferate in a dizzy manner, and by 1869 John Ross Browne was reporting in his “Adventures in the Apache Country”3 that “all popular lawyers are judges in Nevada, whether they practise at the bar or sit upon the bench.” This is true in large parts of the South and Southwest to the present day. In the South most lawyers of any skill at hullabaloo actually become judges soon or late, for there is rotation in the petty judgeships, and once a judge always a judge.4 In England there are no judges at the bar, for a lawyer who has once been upon the bench is not permitted to practise thereafter. But in the United States there is no such squeamishness, and even retired Federal judges are free to plead and beat their breasts before their late colleagues. Justices of the peace and police magistrates are also called judge. Squire survives in the rural areas, but is disappearing from the towns, and is now almost unheard of in the cities. The DAE traces it to 1743. Horwill says that “the squire in an English country district is usually both a landowner and a magistrate, but it is in the former rather than the latter capacity that he is given the name; in America the squire is primarily a justice of the peace, but the name is loosely given, most commonly as a title, to any prominent resident in a village.” In Webster’s American Dictionary of 1852, revised by the lexicographer’s son-in-law, Chauncey A. Goodrich, it was noted that the New Englanders then used the word to designate not only a justice of the peace but also a judge; to this was added: “in Pennsylvania, justices of the peace only.”