American Language
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5. HONORIFICS
The honorifics in everyday use in England and the United States show some notable divergences. On the one hand the English are almost as diligent as the Germans in bestowing titles of honor upon their men of mark, but on the other hand they are very careful to withhold such titles from men who do not legally bear them. In America every practitioner of any branch of the healing art, even a chiropodist or an osteopath, is a doctor ipso facto,110 but in England a good many surgeons lack the title and even physicians may not have it. It is customary there, however, to address a physician in the second person as Doctor, though his card may show that he is only medicince baccalaureus, a degree quite unknown in Amerca. Thus an Englishman, when he is ill, always consults a doctor, as we do. But a surgeon is usually plain Mr.,111 and prefers to be so called, though he may have M.D. on his card, along with F.R.C.S. (fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons). A physician (or surgeon), if he manages to cure the right patients, is not infrequently knighted, in which event he becomes Sir Basil and ceases to be either Dr. or Mr. If royalty patronizes him he may even become Lord Bolus. The Englishman uses the word physician less than we do; he prefers medical man. But with women doctors increasing in number, medical man becomes inconvenient, and medical woman would seem rather harsh to the English, whose natural tendency would be to say medical lady, a plain impossibility. The late Henry Bradley proposed to get round the difficulty by reviving the archaic word leech,112 but it has never been adopted. An English dentist or druggist or veterinarian is never Dr. Nor is the title frequent among pedagogues, for the Ph.D. is an uncommon degree in England, and it is seldom if ever given to persons trained in the congeries of quackeries which passes, in the American universities, under the name of “education.” According to William McAndrew, once superintendent of schools in Chicago and famous as the antagonist of Mayor Big Bill Thompson, every school principal in Boston and New York “has secured a general usage of getting himself called doctor.”113
Professor, like doctor, is worked much less hard in England than in the United States. In all save a few of our larger cities every male pedagogue is a professor, and so is every band leader, dancing master, and medical consultant. Two or three generations ago the title was given to horse-trainers, barbers, bartenders, phrenologists, caterers, patent-medicine vendors, acrobats, ventriloquists, and pedagogues and champions of all sorts.114 Of late its excessive misuse has brought it into disrepute, and more often than not it is applied satirically.115 The real professors try hard to get rid of it. In 1925 those at the University of Virginia organized a society “for the encouragement of the use of Mister as applied to all men, professional or otherwise.” In England professor is used less lavishly, and is thus better esteemed. In referring to any man who holds a professorship in a university it is almost always employed. But when he acquires a secular title, that title takes precedence. Thus it was Professor Almroth Wright down to 1906, but Sir Almroth afterward. Huxley was always called Professor until he was appointed to the Privy Council. This appointment gave him the right to have Right Honourable put before his name, and thereafter it was customary to call him simply Mr. Huxley, with the Right Honourable, so to speak, floating in the air. The combination, to an Englishman, was more flattering than Professor, for the English always esteem political dignities more than the dignities of learning. This explains, perhaps, why their universities distribute so few honorary degrees. In the United States every respectable Protestant clergyman, save perhaps a few in the Protestant Episcopal Church, is a D.D.,116 and it is almost impossible for a man to get into the papers as a figure in anything short of felony without becoming an LL.D., but in England such honors are granted only grudgingly.117 So with military titles. To promote a war veteran from sergeant to colonel by acclamation, as is often done in the United States, is unknown over there. The English have nothing equivalent to the gaudy tin soldiers of our Governors’ staffs, nor to the bespangled colonels and generals of the Knights Templar and Patriarchs Militant, nor to the nondescript captains and majors of our country towns.118 An English railroad conductor (railway guard) is never Captain, as he often is in the United States. Nor are military titles used by the police. Nor is it the custom to make every newspaper editor a colonel, as used to be done south of the Potomac.119 Nor is an Attorney-General or Postmaster-General or Consul-General called General. Nor are the glories of public office, after they have officially come to an end, embalmed in such clumsy quasi-titles as ex-United States Senator, ex-Judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals, ex-Federal Trade Commissioner and former Chief of the Fire Department.120 Nor does every college swarm with deans. Nor is every magistrate a judge. This American fondness for hollow titles goes back to colonial days. An English traveler, Edward Kimber, wrote in 1746: “Where-ever you travel in Maryland (as also in Virginia and Carolina) your ears are constantly astonished at 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 earlier the Scottish physician, Alexander Hamilton, traveling along the Hudson, found an immense number of colonels. “It is a common saying here,” he wrote, “that a man has no title to that dignity unless he has killed a rattlesnake.” After the Revolution many of the discharged soldiers opened inns, and large numbers of them blossomed out as captains, majors and colonels.121 Every successive war brought in a swarm of new military titles, and after the Civil War they were almost innumerable. During the Grant Era it also became common for wives to borrow their husbands’ titles in the German-Scandinavian fashion, and the historian, Edward A. Freeman, who made a lecture tour of the United States in 1881–82, reported when he got home that he had seen Mrs. Professor on a woman’s visiting card and had read in a newspaper of Mrs. ex-Senator. A. Freeman was almost always called either Professor or Doctor by the Americans he encountered. “In some parts,” he said, “a stranger is commonly addressed as Colonel or Judge.” He called attention to an American peculiarity that is still observable: the overuse of Mister. “I noticed,” he said, “that men who were thoroughly intimate with one another, men who were old friends and colleagues, spoke of and to one another with handles to their names, in a way which men in the same case would not do [in England].”122 The leap in the United States is often directly from Mister to Jack, This use of the given-name was popularized by Rotary, the members of which so address one another, and no doubt was also fostered by the advent of the Hon. James A. Farley, whose greeting to all comers was “Call me Jim.”123
But perhaps the greatest difference between English and American usage is presented by the Honorable. In the United States the title is applied loosely to all public officials of any apparent respectability, and with some show of official sanction to many of them, especially Congressmen, but it is questionable whether this application has any actual legal standing, save perhaps in the case of certain judges, who are referred to as the Hon. in their own court records. Even the President of the United States, by law, is not the Honorable, but simply the President. In the First Congress the matter of his title was exhaustively debated; some members wanted to call him the Honorable and others proposed His Excellency and even His Highness. But the two Houses finally decided that it was “not proper to annex any style or title other than that expressed by the Constitution.” Congressmen themselves are not Honorables. True enough, the Congressional Record, in printing a set speech, calls it “Speech of Hon. John Jones” (without the the before the Hon. — a characteristic Americanism), but in reporting the ordinary remarks of a member it always calls him plain Mr. Nevertheless, a country Congressman would be offended if his partisans, in announcing his appearance on the stump, did not prefix Hon. to his name. So would a State Senator. So would a Mayor or Governor. I have seen the sergeant-at-arms of the United States Senate referred to as Hon. in the records of that body,124 and the title is also accorded there to all former members of either House, to State Governors, to Ambassadors, to members of the Cabinet, past or present, and all th
eir principal assistants, to all State officials of any dignity, and to a miscellaneous rabble of other notables, including newspaper editors.125 In February, 1935, an Interstate Assembly of various State officials was held at Washington. In the official report of it,126 the following functionaries, among others, were set down as Hons.: State tax commissioners and assessors, State treasurers, comptrollers and auditors, the deputies and assistants of all these, and all members of State Legislatures.
In England the thing is more carefully ordered, and bogus Hons. are unknown. The prefix is applied to both sexes and belongs by law, inter alia, to all present or past maids of honor, to all justices of the High Court during their term of office, to the Scotch Lords of Session, to the sons and daughters of viscounts and barons, to the younger sons of earls, and to the members of the legislative and executive councils of the colonies. But not to members of Parliament, though each is, in debate, the hon. member, or the hon. gentleman. Even a member of the cabinet is not an Hon., though he is a Right Hon. by virtue of membership in the Privy Council, of which the Cabinet is legally merely a committee. This last honorific belongs , not only to privy councillors, but also to all peers lower than marquesses (those above are Most Hon.), to Lord Mayors during their terms of office, to the Lord Advocate and to the Lord Provosts of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Moreover, a peeress whose husband is a Right Hon. is a Right Hon. herself.127 The British colonies follow the jealous usage of the mother-country. Even in Canada the lawless American example is not imitated. I have before me a “Table of Titles to be Used in Canada,” laid down by royal warrant, which lists those who are Hons. and those who are not Hons. in the utmost detail. Only privy councillors of Canada (not to be confused with imperial privy councillors) are permitted to retain the prefix after going out of office, though ancients who were legislative councillors at the time of the union, July 1, 1867, if any survive, may still use it by sort of courtesy, and former Speakers of the Dominion Senate and House of Commons and various retired judges may do so on application to the King, countersigned by the Governor-General. The following are lawfully the Hon., but only during their tenure of office: the Solicitor-General, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Presidents and Speakers of the provincial Legislatures, members of the executive councils of the Provinces, the Chief Justice, the judges of the Supreme Courts of Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan and Alberta, the judges of the Courts of Appeal of Manitoba and British Columbia, the Chancery Court of Prince Edward Island, and the Circuit Court of Montreal — these, and no more. A Lieutenant-Governor of a Province is not the Hon., but His Honor. The Governor-General is His Excellency, and his wife is Her Excellency, but in practise they usually have superior honorifics, and do not forget to demand their use. In Australia, it would seem, the Hon. is extended to members of the Federal Parliament; at least one of them, to my personal knowledge, has the title engraved upon his visiting-card.128
But though an Englishman, and, following him, a colonial, is thus very careful to restrict the Hon. to its legal uses, he always insists, when he serves without pay as an officer of any organization, upon indicating his volunteer character by writing hon. meaning honorary, before the name of his office. If he leaves it off it is a sign that he is a hireling. Thus, the agent of the New Zealand government in London, a paid officer, is simply the agent, but the agents at Brisbane and Adelaide, in Australia, who serve for the glory of it, are hon. agents. In writing to a Briton of condition one had better be careful to put Esq. behind his name, and not Mr. before it. The English have long made a distinction between the two forms. Mr., on an envelope, indicates that the sender holds the receiver to be his inferior; one writes to Mr. John Jackson, one’s green-grocer, but to James Thompson, Esq., one’s neighbor. But if one encloses an envelope for a reply, addressed to one’s self, one’s name on it must be preceded by Mr., not followed by Esq. Any man who is entitled to the Esq. is a gentleman, by which an Englishman means a man of sound connections and what is regarded as dignified occupation — in brief, of ponderable social position. But in late years these distinctions have been losing force.129 In colonial America Esq. seems to have been confined to justices of the peace, who acquired thereby the informal title of Squire, but inasmuch as every lawyer of any dignity became a justice almost automatically it was eventually applied to most members of the bar.130 It is common to so apply it to this day. Lawyers, like judges, are often designated Esq. in court papers, and when one of them appears on a list of speakers at a political meeting he is usually distinguished from the general, especially in the South, by adding Esq. to his name.
The English in speaking or writing of public officials, avoid those long and clumsy combinations of title and name which figure so copiously in American newspapers. Such locutions as Assistant Secretary of the Interior Jones, Fourth Assistant Postmaster-General Brown, Inspector of Boilers Smith, Judge of the Appeal Tax Court Robinson, Chief Clerk of the Treasury Williams and Collaborating Epidemiologist White131 are quite unknown to him. When an Englishman mentions a high official, such as the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, he does not think it necessary to add the man’s name; he simply says the Secretary for Foreign Affairs or the Foreign Secretary. And so with the Lord Chancellor, the Chief Justice, the Prime Minister, the Bishop of Carlisle, the Chief Rabbi, the First Lord (of the Admiralty), the Master of Pembroke (College), the Italian Ambassador, and so on. But certain ecclesiastical titles are sometimes coupled to surnames in the American manner, as in Dean Inge and Canon Wilberforce.
A lawyer appearing in court before a judge of the English higher courts addresses him as My Lord, and speaks of him in his presence as His Lordship. In the United States the form is Your Honor, which is also proper for county judges in England. A letter to an English high court judge is superscribed The Hon. Mr. Justice—. In America, in speaking to a judge outside his court, it is customary to say simply Judge —, or, if he is a member of the Supreme Court of the United States (or of one or two other courts) Mr. Justice without the surname, or Mr. Chief Justice. A justice of the peace in England is His Worship, and so is a Mayor, and the latter is the Right Worshipful on an envelope. In the United States a Mayor is sometimes called His Honor, but the form seems to have no warrant in law. The Governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire are Your Excellency by statute. In England an Ambassador is His Excellency, and so are colonial Governors. But the intricacies of British titles are so vast that I can’t go into them here.
I have spoken of the American custom of dropping the definite article before Hon. It extends to Rev. and the like, and has the authority of very respectable usage behind it. The opening sentence of the Congressional Record is always: “The Chaplain, Rev. —, D.D., offered the following prayer.” When chaplains for the Army or Navy are confirmed by the Senate they always appear in the Record as Revs., never as the Revs. I also find the honorific without the article in the New International Encyclopaedia, in a widely-popular American grammar-book, and in the catalogue of Groton, the fashionable prep-school, whose headmaster must always be a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church.132 So long ago as 1867, Edward S. Gould protested against this elision as barbarous and idiotic, and drew up the following reductio ad absurdum:
At the last annual meeting of Black Book Society, honorable John Smith took the chair, assisted by reverend John Brown and venerable John White. The office of secretary would have been filled by late John Green, but for his decease, which rendered him ineligible. His place was supplied by inevitable John Black. In the course of the evening eulogiums were pronounced on distinguished John Gray and notorious Joseph Brown. Marked compliment was also paid to able historian Joseph White, discriminating philosopher Joseph Green, and learned professor Joseph Black. But conspicuous speech of the evening was witty Joseph Bray’s apostrophe to eminent astronomer Jacob Brown, subtle logician Jacob White, etc., etc.133
This reductio ad absurdum (which sounds curiously like an extract from the Time of toda
y) was ratified by Richard Grant White in “Words and Their Uses” (1870), and William Cullen Bryant included the omission of the article in his Index Expurgatorius, but their anathemas were as ineffective as Gould’s irony. The Episcopalians in the United States, at least those of the High Church variety, usually insert the the, but the rest of the Protestants omit it, and so do the Catholics; as for the Jews, they get rid of it by calling their rabbis Dr. Now and then some evangelical purist tries to induce the Methodists and Baptists to adopt the the, but always in vain. Throughout rural America it is common to address an ecclesiastic viva voce as Reverend. This custom is also denounced by the more delicate clergy, but equally without effect upon the prevailing speech habit. Some years ago one of the suffering brethren was thus moved to protest in verse:
Call me Brother, if you will;
Call me Parson — better still.
Or if, perchance, the Catholic frill
Doth your heart with longing fill —
Though plain Mister fills the bill,
Then even Father brings no chill