[HPforGrownups] Names

[Shaun Hately]

No: HPFGUIDX 98385

On 14 May 2004 at 11:35, David Burgess wrote:

> When a student is talking to
> - a teacher about a teacher: title and last name
> - a teacher (other than their head of house) about another student: first
> and last name
> - a student about a teacher: title and last name
> - a student about another student: first name

Hi Dave,

The thing is though these schools (British boarding schools) have 
their own rules. And they're a bit different. Now, of course, not 
all schools follow these 'rules' rigidly - but books in the 'school 
story' tradition generally do, because as I've said previously, 
those books tend to be even better exemplars of the 'School 
traditions' than the schools themselves really are.

And one of these 'traditions' - or really I suppose it's better to 
call it a developed practice - is that students generally address 
each other by their surnames. It's not at all disrespectful - it's 
the way things are done. At times, at some schools, it's becomes 
such accepted practice, that you even use surnames to describe 
different siblings - and you add on a suffix to distinguish them, 
rather than use their first names - for example, Smith Major, and 
Smith Minor - or Jones I, Jones II, Jones III... there's a few 
different variations.

The point is, among your equals, using a surname is not 
disrespectful - it's simply the way things are.

At my school (which was an Australian school set up in the late 
19th century as a copy of the best British schools - and which even 
today still embraces the traditions and practices they copied from 
there), which I started in 1988, finishing school in 1992, this is 
the way things worked - and I know it was similar in a lot of other 
schools on the same model. We weren't totally rigid on it anymore - 
I don't know if we ever were, actually.

Now at my school, this is how it worked, roughly.

Teacher to another teacher (if students could hear): Title and 
Surname.

Teacher of another teacher: Title and Surname.

Student to a teacher: Sir, Ma'am, Miss, or Title and Surname (at my 
school, we also had Father and Brother - but you'd rarely use those 
titles talking to a teacher - they were just Sir).

Student of a teacher to another student: Properly speaking, Title 
and Surname - although it wasn't that uncommon to use Sir in this 
context as well ("Sir told me to tell you...") if it wouldn't cause 
confusion. 

Teacher to a student: Surname - *unless* the student was a specific 
charge of yours, or sometimes if they were in some sort of 
distress, in which case you might use a first name.

Student to another student: Surname when dealing with anyone except 
your closest friends. With your close friends, first names were 
commonly used. One big exception to that rule related to Prefects - 
Prefects were commonly addressed by their first names, and that was 
considered a term of respect. Theoretically, prefects would address 
all other boys by their first name as well, but in practice, you 
often didn't have a clue what everybody's first name was!

I don't want to go on forever about this - my point is, though, 
that it's rather awkward to try and assess the courtesies in a 
school - especially a school like Hogwarts which is probably very 
tradition-bound in many ways given its age - based on what happens 
in the outside world, or in other organisations.

Schools form their own rules - and in a lot of schools from the 
British Public School tradition, which Hogwarts does seem to draw 
from in many ways - the use of Surnames alone as a common and 
completely courteous form of address among equals has long been 
perfectly acceptable.
 

Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200 
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the 
facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be 
uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that 
need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia