Posted by Dr John McLeod
on October 26, 2011, 9:43 am, in reply to "Re: Canadian titles"
136.165.65.78
I agree. They are no more feudal-sounding than Sir Frederick Banting or Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. The real problem is that it's now so long since knighthoods were conferred on the recommendation of Canadian governments that chivalric titles have come to sound odd, and "feudal" is an effort to express this oddness. To Canadians of my grandmother's generation (she was born in 1898), knighthoods were a natural part of the scenery, and she would never have thought of saying "Mr Whitney" when she was talking about her father's good friend (and electoral opponent) Sir James Whitney. That wasn't snobbery, it was just the man's name. Even when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the existence of people like Sir Ernest MacMillan or Sir Leonard Outerbridge (who as I recall were ALWAYS referred to as Sir) reminded us that Canadians could be knights, and that made it easy to refer to historical figures as Sir John A. Macdonald or Sir Henry Pellatt. Sadly, those days are gone. Disuse means that "Sir" and "Dame" and "Lady" sound funny to a lot of people, which is why I said earlier that there's no chance of bringing them back.
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