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Today, the term ”professional” is commonly used to mean “does X for a living” (other than what, a hobby?).  Actually, the word properly refers to being sufficiently high skilled that one is subject to the industry self-regulation of one’s peers rather than to a manager who is not a peer from the standpoint of the skills.  Modern management is taught in business schools under the premise that a person can apply managerial skill to anything.  However, where a given vocation is highly skilled and a manager doesn’t have that skill (having instead managerial skill), a manager is not qualified to manage the highly skilled professionals.  Put simply, the professionals know so much more about what they are doing that managerial skill alone cannot be a basis for competency in decisions that involve the highly skilled.    The subversion of the term “professional” is meant to democratize the true professionals beyond physicans, dentists, priests, professors and lawyers—the professional class.  That is, the misnomer is actually a rejection of there being higher classes based on skill.   There is an overreaching involved in the common usage.  In Nietzschean terms, it evinces the herd animal claiming a dominance without the requisite strength.  In other words, democratication can be a case of overreaching and presumptuousness borne out of a resentment towards the wealthy and higher skilled.  The misnomer is a case of passive aggression.  I submit that the incorrect use of the term points to a tension within modern society wherein two distinct groups of people do not respect each other.  The highly skilled and the highly educated dismiss the people using the misnomer as pretentious idiots, while the non-professionals dismiss the distinction based on the skill or education.  “I’m a professional too!” the salewoman proclaims while the lawyer replied, “No you aren’t.”  Mutual dismissiveness.  The culpability is not symetric, however.
Fundamentally, the misnomer is rooted in the non-professional’s presumptuousness and resentment.  These qualities are no substitute for continuing one’s studies in graduate school to become a scholar or turning to a second bachelors degree in a professional school by earning a first degree in  law, divinity, or medicine (business is a professional school but managers are not professionals).  That one degree in law or medicine is typically presumed (mostly in the US) to be a doctorate even though it is the first rather than the terminal degree in the school (the latter degree requiring it as a prereq)  is an instance of the democratization of “professional”—but here it is the professional’s credential that is overstated.  That is to say, it is a case of a lawyer or physician rarifying herself beyond her professional grade as if a lateral move to another field were equivalent to getting two graduate degrees (a masters and doctorate) on top of a first degree. 

The professionals who are accustomed to claiming more than they have actually earned educationally may be motivated to overreach here because their professional standing is in turn being claimed by overreaching pseudo-professionals, such as managers (or bankers).  Not unexpectedly, marginal universities are turning some of their skills-oriented masters degrees (such as physical therapy)  into doctorates by adding a year of study without the required doctoral comprehensive exam of the entire discipline and book-length dissertation of original research, which are required for the Ph.D., D.Sci. M, DBA, DD, and JSD— these are the doctoral degrees of Liberal Arts & Sciences and several of the professional schools (Medicine, Business, Divinity and Law, respectively).  Two years (roughly) of survey courses and a year of senior-level seminars in a professional school does not a doctorate make.  The move is lateral from the first bachelors.  Yet the presumptuousness of the physican and lawyer claiming to have doctorates by virtue of their first degree in medicine and law, respectively, are missed by society in the effulgent gloss of “professional,” which comes to be applied by the society further and further down its chain of vocational being.   The emperor is not wearing any clothes, yet fawning crowds marvel at the cloth and claim to be wearing like material themselves.

Does this make me an elitist—pointing out that the cloth is not as refined as we have been led to believe by those claiming to wear it?  Admittedly, my argument may seem elitist prime facie.  My use of big words doesn’t help. However, it may simply be a case of good old-fashioned truth-telling in the midst of some dandy fibbing to the unknowing, who do not realize that they are being lied to by people with a vested interest in the lies.  Surely it is an act of kindness to tell a man, “excuse me, your fly is unzipped,” or to tell a woman, “there is something in your hair in back.”

Democracy is great; it is the overreaching pretentiousness whereby the demos takes itself for something more that it is—something unearned and thus undeserved—that is pernicious and nefarious.