> Both Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell are married to other people
Dumb language question: if Powell is married, why isn’t she referred to as Mrs. Powell in this article?
Dumb language question: if Powell is married, why isn’t she referred to as Mrs. Powell in this article?
“It is generally considered polite to address a woman by Ms. rather than Mrs., unless the preference of the woman in question is clearly known. This is especially true in written communication, as dictated by professional etiquette. […] It is normally considered correct to address a woman as Ms. [Lastname], regardless of her marital status.”
Hm. Weird. Never seen that before. Let's check the source, emilypost.com:
>Mx. Is the universal title that can be used by anyone. It is gender non-identifying. Even if you identify specifically with a gender you may still use Mx. and you may see Mx. used when the sender is unaware of your title.
https://emilypost.com/advice/guide-to-addressing-corresponde...
OK, im out. I'm immediately out.
Miss indicated that a woman was unmarried. Mrs indicated that she was. Ms was added to behave like Mr in that it doesn't indicate marital status.
Edit: Huh, I just learned after some searching that having a period after "Ms" and "Mr" is not a universal practice!
[1] >25 years in San Diego, >10 years in SF. I'm 40.
Especially in a business context, it would be unprofessional to ask if a woman is married or not merely for determining which title to use. Unless you want to have an affair with her, of course.
This is taught to children in the United States. I didn't go to an especially good school and I remember it to this day. If you're not from the US the custom may be different.
Perhaps you will consider the advice from Grammarly [0] as a more acceptable source.
[0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/commonly-confused-words/ms-mr...
No doubt, in today's absurdly woke school system.
Have you experienced this first hand? Have you done any research? Have you read any peer reviewed papers on the matter that concluded this as a trend?
I think you have never called somebody Mx. to their face, and I don‘t think you have witnessed it either, and I don‘t think you have read any peer reviewed paper which explores people reactions to this title.
there is woman,
and there is Klinefelter's.
(worth the karma hit)
Once that's in place, I would feel better about the use of Mrs.
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...
Many people find it demeaning to address women differently depending on whether or not they are married, especially when we don't do the same for men.
I was always taught it was 'Master' for unmarried and young men.
I remember when I was a kid, bank correspondence would address me as MASTER. I found it amusing.
I don’t think they do that anymore though??? I think our son has always been MR to them, even when he was a 5 year old
She insisted they get my surname only. So that's what they have.
Notably, both my (now ex) wives insisted on taking my last name. I didn’t really care either way.
> [Ms. is] intended as a default form of address for women regardless of marital status. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms.
Wikipedia tries to make it sound like it’s some old tradition, but it’s actually fairly new, with the prior historical references being obscure until it was resurrected. It’s right there in the article:
> “Ms. was another acceptable, but rarely used, abbreviation for Mistress in England in the 17th and 18th centuries.[12] During the 19th century, however, Mrs. and Miss came to be associated almost exclusively with marital status,[13] and Ms. was popularized as an alternative in the late 20th century“
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/insider/1986-ms-joins-the...
I don’t understand this need to rewrite history. Nobody in this thread is objecting to the use of the term. Even the wikipedia article says the term was resurrected in the 80s.
Skeletor will return next week with more disturbing reminders about passage of time...
The term is recent in a linguistic sense. Even if you personally think it’s ancient history, “my dude”, there are plenty of us alive where it was invented in our lifetime.
A teacher explained this to me in elementary school as some new fad.
> Skeletor will return next week with more disturbing reminders about passage of time...
Classy edit, btw.
I realize that the average age on HN is quite young, but we're not talking about ancient history here.
That’s cute. Now try searching for the median age in developed countries, where people care enough to make up revisionist history about minor culture debates? (nevermind, I did it for you; it’s around 50)
More to the point, what’s the human lifespan in first-world countries? (average lifespan in the US is almost 80)
(All this is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that perhaps disparaging people for being older than you is not such a bright idea. I know it’s hard to believe, but we’re not going anywhere for a while.)
Someone on a parallel thread explicitly called the 1980s “ancient”, so whatever.
I hope your day looks up.
You could have avoided the issue entirely by using clearer language like "in the last 40 years."
The idea that I was claiming things older than me are "irrelevant" is nowhere near orbit of anything I wrote.
(Also I don't know if you are American but I am and the median American is around 39.4).
I said the word is recent, linguistically and culturally. I said it was "fairly new". I also said when it was popularized, in terms of actual decades (70s-80s).
You've chosen to die on this particular hill of whether or not something is "recent". I don't know why.
What was that all about if you both perfectly agree on the timeline?
> Classy edit, btw.
Edit? I did not edit my post. I think you may not understand what that means. It is neither classy nor unclassy, it is a type of meme.
It's simply a fact that the term was revived in the 70s and popularized in the 80s. The person I replied to was trying to imply that was incorrect, by suggesting that the NY Times was some long-time holdout.
Given the magnitude of more recent shifts in language around equity, 50 years is ancient.
So your argument is that anyone with a memory longer than yours, yet well within the median human lifespan, is “ancient”.
Okay, then. Good luck with that.
Deftly convincing my rhetorical opponent of my youthful vigor by misunderstanding what they wrote and getting noticeably worked up about being called ‘ancient’
Gloria Steinem cofounded Ms. Magazine in the early 70s which helped popularize it further.
Anyway, how old are you that well over half a century is “fairly new” to you? Do you still wear galoshes and use a mimeograph?
But when Mrs first stood for Mistress, the word Mistress wasn't "loaded" at all.
If an abbreviation is never expanded, is it still an abbreviation? Personally I think it isn’t; I advocate for condensing i.e./e.g. to simply ie and eg, though this is a minority opinion.
Only in English.
Because she is about to be single?