professor

   In Britain it is only a teacher of the highest rank in a university department who is addressed as ‘Professor’; in the USA the title is extended, normally, to other teachers at a university or college, and in some cases, to school teachers.

   In Deborah, by Marian Castle, which is set in Dakota at the beginning of the twentieth century, occurs the following:

   ‘I hope the change will be good for you, Professor.’ He was mighty young, she thought, to be a professor, the title by which the local teacher - if male - was always known.

   ‘Don’t call me “Professor”,’ he snapped.

   ‘Why not?’

   ‘Because I’m nothing but an instructor, an underpaid, unnoticed, unimportant instructor at the new University of Chicago. Maybe, after another twenty years and a couple more degrees and a book or so, I might really have become a full professor.’

   Against this one can put the comment by Peter de Vries in his novel Let me Count the Ways. ‘It’s good to have you back, Professor Waltz,’ she said. I had given up trying to make her understand that I was only an instructor, realizing that the dignity of the house, as well as her own ego, were nourished by use of the more prestigious title.

   In Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, we find: ‘“Thought you’d gone without me. Professor,” he added, nearly too late.’ Amis has already told us that ‘no other professor in Great Britain set such store on being called Professor’. Dixon, the hero of the novel, thinks it expedient to do as his head of department wishes, though later in the novel we are told how he would like to address the professor if he had a free choice in the matter: he’d just say, quite quietly and very slowly and distinctly, to give Welch a good chance of catching his general drift: Look here, you old cockchafer, what makes you think you can run a history department, even at a place like this, eh, you old cockchafer?

   In the nineteenth century ‘Professor’ was often adopted as a grandiose title by teachers of dancing, phrenology, and a variety of other subjects.

   In 1864 a social commentator was moved to say: ‘The word Professor - now so desecrated in its use that we are most familiar with it in connection with dancing-schools, juggler’s booths, and veterinary surgeries.’ This ‘desecration’ of the title had happened rather quickly, since it seems to have been only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that the university title began to be used vocatively. In modern times ‘Professor’ may still be given as a nickname to anyone who shows signs of intelligence above the average. In the navy, as Wilfred Granville expresses it in his Dictionary of Naval Slang, it is lower-deck slang for ‘one who is more of a B.A.than an AB’.

   A black American speaker in An American Dream, by Norman Mailer, uses the term to a white man who is obviously educated: ‘I know this Mafia bitch, she’s made it with hoodlums, black men, some of the class, now she picks you, Professor, looking to square out’

   Ad hoc usage of the term to someone who passes on information with an air of authority, occurs in The River, by Steven Bauer. ‘“They’re striking,” Lewis said. “They want more money, better conditions. They say their labor is the most valuable thing they have.” ‘Where’d you hear that, professor?’ Roy asked. “Talking to some of the strikers.”’

   Rather similar is an exchange between two Los Angeles policemen in The Choirboys, by Joseph Wambaugh: ‘Suddenly Baxter said: “You know what I think is the best a cop can hope for?” “Tell me, professor.”’ The Critic, by Wilfrid Sheed, has: ‘You don’t tell a tennis player to improve his character, you tell him to improve his game.’ This is spoken by a man to his wife. She replies: ‘Yes, professor.’

   This is not his professional title, merely an ironic comment on his didactic manner.

   Chapman’s Dictionary of American Slang says that ‘Professor’ can refer to an orchestra leader or to a piano-player in a saloon or brothel, but he does not make it clear whether the word is used as a term of address to such people.