The 'Miss' revival
Are the women under 30 reclaiming the honorific or betraying the sisterhood?
"Check honorifics," NBR staff were told at an editorial meeting Friday, "Because women under 30 increasingly want to be called 'Miss'."
I snorted. This could not be the case.
But a quick canvass of my Twitter followers revealed there was something of a "Miss" revival. Several career gals I assumed would be "Ms" were in fact in Camp Miss.
Scroll down to Comments to see a selection of the feedback (and I'm just going to go right ahead and assume everybody was under 30).
Broadly speaking, there were two factions: Those who saw it as reclaiming the word, and being unashamed of being unattached, and those who saw it as retrograde; after everything the sisterhood went through to get an equivalent title to the neutral "Mr." "Ms" was being cluelessly thrown away.
There were also a few who favoured no honorific (my personal preference, in articles and in life, at least until I get a knighthood).
It doesn't help that "Ms" is awkward. It seems contrived, and there are connotations of political correctness. "Ms" reveals nothing about your marital status but a lot about your personal politics; it's the non-label that labels you. It also causes an element of confusion. A couple of people thought Ms denoted a divorced woman. For the record, the Collins English Dictionary says "Ms" = "a title substituted for "Mrs" or "Miss" before a woman's name to avoid making a distinction between married and unmarried women"; "Mrs" = "a title used before the name or names of a married woman" and "Miss" = "an unmarried woman or girl, esp a schoolgirl".
On the other hand, "Ms" and "Mrs" are labels; sound 18th century (to me), and neither are applicable when a couple has been in a long-term relationship without getting married (and then there's the disagreement between Helen Clark and the NZ Herald over "Ms" and "Mrs" that ended up with the married PM being called Miss Clark in article after article for years. Lately there's been a mix of Miss and Ms Clark).
It's a thorny one. Luckily, as a bloke, I only have to worry about it in the abstract.
Scroll down to see what the girls ladies women thought and, as ever, feel free to add your own comments.
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The 'Miss' revival
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