mleh

[bluebren_livejournal]

They need to come up with a ceremony, or rite of passage, or even just decide on an age, for when you're allowed to call adults by their first names. I still feel weird doing that sometimes.

Comments

[bwillsouth.livejournal.com]

Graduate students ordinarily call their professors by their first names. A couple weeks ago I had a conversation with a UT linguistics grad student, where I referred to Prof. Stephen Wechsler as "(Prof.) Wechsler" and he referred to him as "Steve". A grad student I know here once mentioned how strange it was when he came into the grad program, having done undergrad here, and suddenly the professors were treating him as a peer and they were on a first-name basis.

But I definitely agree that there should be a ritual. Germans have a ritual for it, and even a verb ("[sich] duzen") that means "to address informally" or "to be on informal terms with".

[bwillsouth.livejournal.com]

Well, more specifically that ritual also has to do with the use of informal "du" vs. formal "Sie" as your pronoun of address, but it's inclusive of using first names.

[renshai.livejournal.com]

I've almost gotten used to calling my teachers at college and, to a lesser extent, university by their first names - it's how they introduce themselves, after all, so it must be okay.

But I still can't bring myself to call my former high school teachers by their first names, and despite my aunt informing me that it's perfectly fine to call her just by her first name, I still can't seem to say anything other than Auntie X when talking to her. It just feels weird, and it's not even like it's a matter of respect, because I respect my profs now as much or more than I respected my teachers in high school.