The Jill Biden furor is about more than titles. It touches on gender, race and civility.

Over the weekend I was angsting about how to address the last of my holiday cards. What’s the proper form for a same-sex couple? Or a modern widow, even a divorcee? And what about when one spouse has a professional title — like reverend, judge or doctor — like my friends, Dr. Amanda Cook and her husband, Ian Cook. Doing this correctly is not always easy or intuitive, which is one reason why titles have generally gone the way of dinosaurs. Then there’s the other reason: Americans like the fiction that all people are created equal. A title — or what’s also known as an honorific — only disrupts that fantasy.

In the midst of sealing and stamping the cards, the internet rightly blew up when Joseph Epstein, what my late father would have called an “agent provocateur,” attempted to humiliate Jill Biden, the incoming first lady, by recommending she drop the use of her title, which "sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” “Dr.,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, should be reserved only for those with an M.D., adding, “A wise man once said that no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child.”