Miss to go the way of Master
WHAT’S the process for declaring a word null and void?
Is there some privy council that decides when a word has trended itself out of existence, both practically and fashionably, and should hence be removed from all dictionaries and common usage?
If there was, there’d surely be a solid case for “Miss”.
Miss may have once served a practical purpose when it was imperative to tell the difference between the married and unmarried, and to know how to address the latter, but these days it’s no one else’s business.
It’s also no longer necessary, as we’ve come up with a perfectly handy title that morphs Miss and Mrs into a vowel-less Ms, leaving others none the wiser as to the recipient’s marital status.
As it should be.
I’m on this high horse because I’m not sure which one I am.
When I’m changing banks, the teller asks, “Miss, Mrs or Ms?” I go with Ms. Resignedly.
I’m slightly offended that he couldn’t have worked it out by himself.
Do I look like a contentedly married woman? Do I look too old for Miss?
So Ms it is.
Wasn’t Ms designed for girls like me? To save us the shame of having to tick the Miss box when we’re way past expected marrying age?
Ms gives us dignity in our in-between state or in our rather-be-single-but-am-no-longer-21 mode. The forms should specify where Miss ends and Ms begins because no one’s too sure.
I’ve been hanging on to Miss for as long as I could get away with it, but now I must face the fact that it’s time to move on.
I have no choice. It happens when a testy shop assistant puts the hard word on me over my excessive shoe trying-on.
“Do you want these or not, Miss?” he asks, gesturing to the piles of boxes surrounding me.
“I’m not Miss,” I deride. “I’m Ms.”
It’s only as I say it that I realise Ms is good because with it comes maturity (implied), respect (demanded) and the suggestion that, unlike a mere Miss, I may well know what I’m doing when it comes to buying shoes and may even be able to afford all of those splayed out before me.
I’d never fought for Ms before, had avoided it all my life, yet here I was trying it on for size. And it fits.
I’d thought Ms was only for divorced women who can’t really be called Miss once they’ve been a wife, or for women who’ve given up.
I’ve not given up. But in being disparaging of Ms, are we doing a disservice to our foremothers who fought so hard for it?
Ms was invented by feminists (a convenient typo, so legend has it) seeking to blur the lines between married and unmarried and make us generic equal beings. Ms allows women to succeed on merit irrespective of their love lives.
But surely a moniker alone doesn’t bestow independence.
And it has its connotations. A Ms is suspected of having something to hide, that she’s either divorced or unmarried and ashamed of it.
Miss, having inexplicably outlasted `Master’ for unmarried men, has no place except in Tatler magazine, where the Misses Lara Winston-Farriers are distinguishable from the Mrs Edward Barrington-Lesters.
A Miss is a maiden of fair game. No need to say, “Meet Lara – she’s single” when Miss precedes her name.
Which is all very well until a certain age, when Miss becomes an embarrassment. So, if we must choose one, tick `”Ms”. At least it’ll keep ‘em guessing.