Comment by inerte
4 days ago
Or the judge who sued his condominium demanding its employees call him "doutor" (Your Honor)...
As a Brazilian raised to not care about this stuff, I would say even rebelled a bit, it was weird to basically be required to do so once I reached adulthood. I remember getting in front of a sheriff and having to address him as "doutor". I remember talking to an intern in law firms and he corrected me when I addressed him by name saying, "No, it's DOUTOR Adriano".
Gee, let's not even mention the medical field... veterinarians and nutritionists want to be called "doutor"...
I moved from Brazil to Sweden and it is hard talking to medical doctors, it is so indoctrinated into us.
me: Hi Doctor... I have X problem, Doctor. Could you give me some treatment, Doctor?
Doctor: You can just call me Ana
me: Yes Doctor Ana
Even for professionals that don't have titles if they have authority over you, you need to use the title. VERY evident when talking to police officers always say "Senhor" (sir), police have the power to really screw with you without any reason so better to show respect. You never know when you run into a police officer who enjoys screwing people over.
The Germans are also pretty ridiculous around titles, in that not only can you have multiple titles, and each are mentioned, but you can also have several copies of each. So someone can be Herr Doktor Doktor Professor.
But "Doctor" means you have an actual PhD, a doctorate. That's a worthy title, IMHO
My country has a fairly high % of PhD holders, but nowhere near enough jobs for them, so they end up getting regular jobs (e.g. I have a friend who got a PhD in laser physics, who now plays with AI models for license plate recognition).
These people usually leave the PhD off their CV, as some employers frown upon it, as they think the person will have higher expectations and be hard to work with.
4 replies →
The senior title comes first -- Prof. Dr. Dr. Honorary doctorates are "honoris causa", abbreviated h.c. If you get multiple of these, you write Dr. h.c. mult. So you occasionally find Prof Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. X (would have been the correct way to address Umberto Eco, for instance). After introductions, people generally name only the most senior title, if any.
That’s really interesting. Re medical field — by contrast surgeons in the UK are called “Mr” (Mister) or “Ms”, for historical reasons.