titles

I've never been good at titles. Putting titles to my own work is always the last thing I do. Academic titles have a formulaic bend to them, yet I still wasn't good at it.

The dissertation killed me on many levels, not the least of which was titles. The thing had 5 chapters, so I needed 6 blasted titles. My diss buddy, (the one who saw me through frantic email after frantic email near the end) got several that had to do with titles alone.

I stand in awe of students that manage to come up with cool, pithy titles.

I remember very few specific comments on papers I wrote in college, but for one of my seminars I wrote an essay on Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills. Linden Hills parallels Dante's Inferno (which was the overall point of discussion in the essay). I titled the essay Mirror Mirror in the Round, which elicited a "cool title" comment from the teacher. You know I remember that one.

I digress, however. This post was actually inspired by title angst of a different sort. Got two Christmas cards in the mail today both of which came addressed to

HUBBY's Professional title and Mrs. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

It annoyed me. Mr. and Mrs. XXXXXXXX I wouldn't even have noticed. (Although my mom's been addressing individual letters to me as "Mrs. HUBBY'S FULL NAME" for years now, and I fuss at her about it frequently. I even get address labels in Mrs. HUBBY'S FULL NAME courtesy of Mom's magazine gift subscriptions)

In any case, the fact that hubby got a professional title and I didn't irked me.
In fact, believe it or not, neither my diploma nor my dissertation came addressed to Dr. XXXXXXXXXXX. I don't insist on titles. I'm the teacher whose students more often than not call her by her first name, but if you're gonna use them, at least use the right ones. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!