Re: You have a word for it?

On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Dennis Paul Himes wrote:

>     It seems in reading this discussion that people are assuming that "Miss"
> means a woman is not married and "Mrs." means that she is.  This is a
> convention which some people use, but it is not the convention I was taught
> and was not the prescriptivist convention used by (for instance) the New
> York Times back before it belatedly adopted "Ms."  The convention I learned
> is that "Mrs." is used for a woman who is using a husband's surname, and
> "Miss" is used otherwise.  So a divorced woman who kept her married name
> would be "Mrs.", and a married woman who kept her maiden name would be
> "Miss".
>
Fortunately, I have here, next to me, a married woman who kept her maiden
name - my wife.  :-)

Her feeling on the matter is that "Ms." is pronounced /mis/ - not what she
was taught, but what appears to be most evident in practice.  Of course,
she has also become accustomed to a tradition which seems to be prevalent
here and elsewhere in the southeast U.S., the informal address by a child
to an adult as "Mister" or "Miss" (or presumably "Ms.") and the adult's
first name.

--
  Steve Kramer           ||           scooter (at) buser dot net          ||
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 |/~       \_     {  / |     "When life hands you lemons, you say, 'Yeah?
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