What's in a title

Some people find that my family name is too long. Not infrequently, US supermarket cashiers used to  ask whether I had difficulty learning how to write my name when I was little (!)

But the length of my name (20 letters) in comparison to "Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg" (89 letters, not counting spaces) is small.

If you've never heard of this fellow, besides your obvious guess that he is noble, he is also Christian (Catholic, to be exact), he is a member of a political party with a religious name, the "Christian Social Union of Bavaria", the current minister of defence in Germany, married to an equally noble person, Countess Stephanie of Bismarck-Schönhausen, great-great-granddaughter of Otto von Bismarck.

Besides his fame, he has very recently become infamous too as he was accused of incorporating numerous excerpts from previously published literature in his doctoral thesis, without crediting the sources. See here and here.

Of course, he refuses this. And he is backed up by Angela Merkel. Of course.

According to BBC, ZDF television website dubbed him "Zu Copyberg", Financial Times Deutschland named him "Baron Cut-and-Paste", and Berlin daily Tageszeitung nicknamed him "Zu Googleberg".

The plagiarism allegation arose when a law professor from Bremen University began writing a review of Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg's thesis, using the Internet. Most likely, the wonderful Internet helped Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg finish his PhD (and do something more important, politics) and also the Bremen prof. who easily discovered plagiarism by googling Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg's thesis.


Are we surprised?
No. (i) There is a strong correlation between someone being a politician and being dishonest. A colleague from the US once told me "I don't understand why people are so surprised every time a scandal about a politician is revealed; I'd be surprised if the opposite happened." (ii) I personally wouldn't trust anyone who belongs to a party with a religious name. (iii) The titles! You can have as long name as you wish, but it is so much more comfortable to have a long name, especially one that uses both VON and ZU (I've actually never heard of that before), so much so that, if you're the holder of such a name, you probably feel more important than others and, hence, less vulnerable, and can justify to yourself to plagiarize (a wee bit) in order to achieve a noble purpose.

Back to the titles, however. Although I have no proof about the following claim (just empirical evidence) I feel that people who are von's and zu's and people who attach lots of name titles after their surname (Prof. Dr. Qxqz Xpliwar, BSc, MSc, PhD, FFS, FRBS) do so because they feel that their titles equip them with a certain shield. Even though they will refute any claim of importance to titles, the mere fact that they carry them on their web sites, business cards and at their doors, feels (to me) like an attempt to impress and, therefore, make their lives easier. Imagine, for example, a professor in a university with lots of titles (of nobility or academic ones). Suppose, for instance, that this professor, at some point, got tired of learning anything new in his/her field, or doing anything new, and started teaching/researching the same old stuff forever. In such a case, titles help. They help because it is more difficult to accuse someone with lots of titles, rather than someone with none. As a matter of fact, certain combinations of titles make it obvious (to me) that they are used precisely for this purpose. For what is the purpose of, say, preceding "PhD" with "MSc" and "BSc"? If you see a name, followed by "PhD" only, would you think that this person got a PhD without first getting a lower degree? (If so, then this person is brilliant.) But the bottomline of using lots of titles excessively is (in my opinion again) insecurity.

Having said that, of course, I do not want to trivialize important awards given to people for real work, awards which lead to a distinction with a name title. Life-time achievements are, and rightly so, rewarded. What I am saying is that acquired titles and the use of excessive name titles are nothing but a sign of insecurity and incompetence (in my opinion).

So, no, I'm not surprised that Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg is accused of plagiarism.