WHAT'S UP, DOC?(The New York Times uses Dr. as its title in front of Senator Bill Frist's name, which is a sign of respect )

The recent coup in the big marble palace on Capitol Hill turns out to have been a two-parter. Part One everybody knows about: just before Christmas, Trent Lott, of Mississippi, was forced out as the Republican leader of the Senate and replaced by Bill Frist, of Tennessee. It was a nice, clean trade-in, which not only substituted an attractive-seeming fellow for an unctuous incompetent but also changed the question of the day from "How come these guys are always pining for Jim Crow and white supremacy?" to "Isn't it reassuring that they got rid of that terrible man?" Part Two kicked in a couple of weeks ago, when the Times stopped referring to Lott's successor as Mr. Frist and started calling him Dr. Frist.

Like the switch from Lott to Frist, the switch from Mr. Frist to Dr. Frist was a canny move. "Dr." means "good." It means taking care of people, curing their illnesses, relieving their pain, binding up their wounds, saving their lives. It means honored, learned, respected. Its humanitarian glamour sprinkles fairy dust even on Doctors of Business Administration. Its positive associations earn "Dr. Evil" a laugh even from people who have never seen Mike Myers touch his pinkie to the corner of his mouth. So having a leader who's a Dr. is a handy political prescription-drug plan for a party that is sometimes diagnosed as suffering from an eighty-year case of chronic compassion-deficiency syndrome, especially on "health-care issues."

Honorifics are something of an obsession at the Times, whose editors, having reflected deeply upon the subject, have codified their thoughts in "The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage." The entry on "courtesy titles" is one of the longest. The gist of it is that in the Times every living person gets his or her last name preceded by a title--usually Mr., Mrs., or Ms.--unless he or she is being written about in the sports section or is a little kid or is a high-art legend (Pavarotti, for example) or has a goofy stage name like Meat Loaf. (The style book thinks it would be "overliteral" to call him Mr. Loaf.) The Times used to take the "Mr." away from anyone convicted of a felony, but that policy had to be dropped during the Watergate era, when the criminal classes and the ruling classes began to merge.

"Physicians' or dentists' titles should be used in all references," the style book directs. That's the plain language of the statute, but the justices of the Supreme Desk evidently interpret "all references" to mean "all references to physicians and dentists acting in a medical or dental capacity." The late Graham Chapman, of Monty Python's Flying Circus, was a physician, but he was always Mr. Chapman in the Times. Michael Crichton, M.D. and author, and Charles Krauthammer, M.D. and columnist, are mostly Messrs. Jonathan Miller, M.D., director, author, and pioneering sketch comedian ("Beyond the Fringe"), is sometimes Mr. Miller, as when he's staging an opera, and sometimes Dr. Miller, as when he's lecturing on neurology, his medical specialty.

Is there a doctor in the House? There are eight, actually, plus three ...