O'Really?

It’s easy to be impressed by people’s titles. From the Chief of this, to the Director of that and from the President of this, to the Leader of that or the Head of whatever and Manager of so-and-so: Titles tell you something about their holder. In the UK we have some extraordinarily grandiose titles, some of which have been in the news recently, often for the wrong reasons:

• Lord Mandelson (formerly Prince of Darkness), now Peter Mountbatten-Darkness
  • The Right Honourable … A peculiar title used in the third person
• Commander of the British Empire: what’s left of it (CBE)
  • Order of the British Empire: what’s left of it (OBE),
  • Member of the British Empire: what’s left of it (MBE)
• Sir, not like “Yes Sir” in school or “SIR, YES SIR!” in the military but:
  • SIR as in Knight Bachelor or
  • Knight Bachelorette aka Dame
• Kings and Queens like:
  • Charles Mountbatten-Windsor (I’ve just stripped him of his title…)
  • Camilla Mountbatten-Windsor (.. and his wife too)
  • and Not My King
• Fairy Tale Titles like:
  • Princess of Wales: Catherine Mountbatten-Windsor (stripped again)
  • Prince: …less of a fairy tale, more of a horror story and not just for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor

Universities everywhere are stuffed full of people with fancy sounding titles too: Professors, Chancellors, Masters, Fellows, Doctors, Deans, Principals, Rectors, Proctors, Wardens and so on. Churches love to lord it over us too with their Archishops, Bishops, Deacons and Vicars etc. In many organisations you’ll find plenty of Associate so-and-so’s, Deputy this and Vice that.

Titles, titles everywhere! While there are many good and legitimate reasons for using titles, they aren’t always used with honourable intentions. I’m thinking of scenarios like:

• “Don’t you know who I am?”
• “We’re not on first name terms yet”
• “You must use my titles when addressing me…”

Titles can be dehumanising for both addresser and addressee. People being stripped of their titles is a good reminder that we shouldn’t be too enamoured by them in the first place, especially when they carry lots of baggage. The weightier the title, the more cumbersome it can be.

Titles have a tendency to put people on a pedestal, which they inevitably fall off at some point. Shelley puts it better:

So, titles are tinsel because we’re all human, decorated or otherwise. You might like a bit of tinsel on your Christmas tree, who doesn’t, but a Christmas tree is still a Christmas tree – without or without the decorations. So it shouldn’t always matter so much if we are titled, en-titled, un-titled, de-titled, re-titled or stripped of our titles, we all have human flaws which might otherwise be obscured by decorative titles.

References

1. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1812) “Declaration of Rights.” In The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume 1, edited by E. B. Murray. Romantic Poetry; Oxford University Press. DOI:10.1093/actrade/9780198127482.book.1

You can cite this page using a Digital Object Identifier provided by rogue-scholar.org either the long DOI:10.59350/1fs12-2z824 or shorter doi.org/qvd8, both point to the same thing.