Re: [xmca] Terms of Endearment

On Thu, 13 Dec 2007, Ana Paula B. R. Cortez wrote:

> Dear David (Professor Kellog? Mr Kellog? Mr David?),
>

How about "Professor David"?

I saw this when at Louisiana State University, in the southern
plantation-area part of the US. Faculty from the north generally wanted to
be addressed by our first names (if not by students, at least by our
department staff); but it was clear to me that for some life-long
Louisiana residents this was a difficult if not painful violation of
deeply habituated norms. So I didn't resist being addressed as "Dr.
Whitson."

I had a very different experience in Taipei (Taibei) in the early 1970's.
For a few weeks one summer, there was a group of students there from a
U.S. university supervised by a faculty member who was generally referred
to as "Professor Smith." The local Taiwan students became outraged when
they found out that he was not really a Professor, but only an Assistant
Professor. They felt that he had been perpetrating some sort of monstrous
fraud on them.
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Thu Dec 13 07:39 PST 2007