An article I added to Omniglot today, The Most Valuable Languages for an MBA to Learn, uses “an MBA” to refer to a person with an MBA. I’ve also seen students referred to in a similar way: for example a student of French might be ‘a French Major’, and someone with a PhD in linguistics might be ‘a linguistics PhD’.
This usage appears to be common in American English, as far as I can tell, but sounds rather strange to my British ears.
Does this sound normal to you?
Are people with particular qualifications referred as ‘a [name of qualificaiton]’ in other languages?
Calling someone an MBA or a French Major sounds perfectly normal to me, but NOT a linguistics PhD. I have a Masters degree in Theological Studies, but it would sound strange to call me an MTS. Yet it would be normal to say that I am a Master of Theological Studies. This is probably the influence of American and British English here in Canada. We’re quite mixed up, with both Americanisms and Britishisms and it is all rather random.
American here. Sounds completely normal.
(And if you compare my response with Heike’s you might guess that American English values terseness very highly, even sometimes above clarity. I think you’d be right and that might shed some light on the original question.)
After having lived in USA for over 33 years, it sounds normal to me. Also quite frequently encountered: “He/she is an MD”.
It’s something I’ve only heard in Northern American English. It still jars a little, but when you think about it it’s not that different to say “X has a PhD” or “did a Masters”.
But it does seem to cast the completing of an academic course of study and thereby achieving an award as the elevation to a whole new identity, as if one’s core being is different after you get your/or “became” a PhD. Of that, I remain dubious.
Rather like the doctor who refers to “the appendix in room 200”. Or one might refer to an entire group like “Who pulled that clever prank? It was the physics majors”. Just a synedoche perhaps or a similar trope? At least, to this native American English speaker.
Wow, I had never realised that British people don’t say this! I’m an American who’s been over here for two and a half years now, but dialect is still full of surprises. 🙂