Yesterday night, around 10pm, my friend called up to discuss whether a Ph.D. can use Dr. or a MBBS can use Dr. I blinked, my attitude being what do I care?
This morning, piqued, I checked the dictionaries. So here we go into the origin and the usage of the word Doctor.
The Oxford and Webster dictionaries describe it as a noun describing a medical doctor or a person who has obtained Ph.D., the highest degree that a university offers.
The Merriam-Webster degree further provides the etymology of the word as Teacher from Middle English Doctour.
My students love to use Wikipedia, believing it to be more complete and comprehensive than any research papers. So I turned to it to see what I can come up about the usage. It provided the origin and usage of the word Doctor. Apparently there is also Biology wiki called Biocrawler, hmmm, wonder if the students have discovered it? Anyway, the site provides the answer to my friend's question. The usage differs between US and UK. In US, the M.D. degree is considered as first-professionals and therefore, are allowed to prefix their name with Dr. In UK, only those with Ph.D. can do so.
Of course none of our beloved politicians and cine stars who have been conferred the honorary doctorate can prefix their names with Dr. Remarkably both US and UK are agreed on that.
But my favorite is what I discovered when long time back we were living in Lucknow. One of our neighbours had a name plate in front of their house. It was written Er. X. I was puzzled by Er. The dictionaries describe it as an abbreviation either for Emergency Room or for Erybium. They missed the third. Er in this case was an abbreviation for Engineer!
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