schoolmaster

   This would not normally be used as a professional title in direct address, but there is a fine passage in Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens, which demonstrates how it can be converted to that use. Bradley Headstone is talking to Eugene Wrayburn, addressing him by his full name and social title.

   Eugene says:

   ‘You have my name very correctly. Pray what is yours?’

   ‘It cannot concern you much to know, but-’ ‘True,’ interposed Eugene, striking sharply and cutting him short at his mistake, ‘it does not concern me at all to know. I can say Schoolmaster, which is a most respectable title. You are right, schoolmaster.’

   Dickens continues: ‘It was not the dullest part of this goad in its galling of Bradley Headstone, that he had made it himself in a moment of incautious anger.’

   Eugene continues to use ‘Schoolmaster’ throughout the ensuing conversation, even after Headstone insists on telling him his name, and contrives to make the word an insult. This is clearly not because of the word itself, which in many countries would indeed be, as Eugene said, a respectable title. It is more the dismissive impact of admitting that a person’s name is not worth bothering about, clearly implying that the person who bears the name is of no consequence. Shakespeare has ‘Master Schoolmaster’ as a term of address in Love’s Labour’s Lost (4:ii).