Thursday, February 28, 2019

Titles and Honorifics: Miss ...As in "Don't Want to Miss..."



purchase [ Aerosmith: Don't Want ....]

I'll go off on a tangent here ... A somewhat-warped tangent, but I think I still play by the rules: Miss ... Mister ... Dr ...

A number of my co-workers include their honorifics as part of their email signatures (PhD ...)

I once considered including mine: BA/English  ... and then it seemed ... I don't know... fake ... un-called for. But then I earned a CNA degree (That's Certified Network Administrator) from Novell [remember them?]  after 2 years of rather grueling courses and tests. Again, I thought to include it in my email signature, but opted against. (TWE) To What End?

In and between all this time, society went from monikers such as "Master so-and-so" - relegated to the dust-pile of history - and then we more or less trashed the use of "Miss so-and-so" in place of Ms...

Honorific titles (and such) appear to be in a state of transition. How about the standard business letter that used to start: "Dear Sir..."? How do you reformat that for this day and age? Is "Sir" an honorific of another past generation?

As I noted in my mail to the blog writers, in Europe, some of the honorifics get compounded/extended, such that we get Prof. Dr. so-and-so.

But I digress. Off on the tangent I mentioned ...
The word "miss" has more than one meaning (as do numerous other words in English). It can be one of the honorifics of the current theme. Or it can mean "to lack".

We'll work with the latter.

Aerosmith's "Don't Want to Miss a Thing" has little to do with honorifics (but it satisfies our theme in that it includes one of the honorifics key-words: miss).  It's about "treasuring every moment with another person" - a nice thought to take into tomorrow and beyond. The lyrics are sprinkled with "baby" throughout, but baby is not an honorific title. Maybe it should be. The word <God> shows up, too, but neither is that considered an honorific title.






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