Last month, we grammar bloggers were all abuzz about the Queen’s English Society and their quixotic quest for the instatement of an academy to regulate the English language. The Society have already been clobbered by Stan Carey, Mark Liberman, John E. McIntyre, and David Mitchell.
There is little I could add to this quartet of brilliant battery, so instead of a general discussion of the Society’s shortcomings, I want to look at one of the things they’re complaining about as an example of bad English. The QES’s complaints are petty, insane, or both. Case in point: they’d like to see Ms. abolished. Why?
- It’s an abbreviation, but it has no long form.
- It’s “unpronounceable” since it lacks a vowel.
- It was created by “certain” women who “suddenly became sensitive about revealing their marital status.”
Regarding point 1, this is matter of being beholden to word labels. It reminds me of an objection I once received to preposition stranding; “preposition” suggests “in a position before”, and therefore a preposition at the end of a sentence, where it doesn’t precede anything, must be incorrect.
So it goes with abbreviations; if you want to be literal, an abbreviation is an abbreviated form of something. But Ms. doesn’t need to be a literal abbreviation to exist. It does exist, as anyone can plainly see. If it’s not an abbreviation, that doesn’t stop it existing any more than a mannequin not being human stops it existing.
Ms. isn’t an abbreviation, but rather a blend. It’s a combination of the two words Miss and Mrs., and it happens to inherit the closing period of the abbreviation Mrs., making it superficially resemble an abbreviation. That’s all.
And if we’re doing an abbreviation witch-hunt, what is Mrs. short for? Missus, one might say, but that isn’t really a word of its own as much as a spelling of the pronunciation of Mrs. Etymologically, Mrs. is an abbreviation of mistress, but the meaning of that word has changed sufficiently that you’d be stirring up a good deal of trouble if you called someone’s wife a “mistress”. I would argue that in modern English Mrs. itself is no longer an abbreviation, but a fully independent lexical item, much like Ms.
Regarding point 2, well, we all manage to pronounce Ms. pretty well for the lack of a vowel supposedly rendering it unpronounceable. How do we do it? Technically speaking, the standard pronunciation of Ms. doesn’t have a vowel. We were told in school that all words need to have vowels, since each syllable has to have a vowel, but that’s not quite right. Some consonants can function as the nucleus of a syllable, just like a vowel. This is more apparent in some non-English languages, such as Berber or Slavic languages. For instance, in Czech or Slovak, you can apparently tell someone to stick their finger through their throat by saying Strč prst skrz krk (audio), a sentence where every word has a nucleic r in lieu of a vowel.
English does this, too, albeit more rarely. We often reduce and down to a syllabic [n] or [ŋ] between words (as in the restaurants Eat ‘n Park or In-N-Out), and word-final [l] and [r] are sometimes syllabic as well (as in bottle [boɾl] or pepper [pepr]). As you might have guessed, [z] is another syllabic consonant, which explains how we are able to pronounce [mz] as a stand-alone word.
Again, I don’t mean to demonize Mrs., but if we’re getting rid of vowel-less words, wouldn’t we have to get rid of it, too? Mrs. lacks a vowel orthographically, and has to trade its r for two [ɪ]s and an extra [z] just to get pronounced (as [mɪzɪz])! Now that’s unpronounceable!
Regarding point 3, this is a contentious point, and I don’t want you to think that I’m caricaturing the QES, so let me quote the entirety of their paragraph on it:
“This linguistic misfit [Ms.] came about because certain — note: certain, not all — women suddenly became sensitive about revealing their marital status. Or perhaps they were annoyed that they could not identify a man as married or single by his title. We won’t begrudge these women their complexes but surely there is a better solution to their problem than an unpronounceable buzz!”
Women, amiright? Well, no. Actually, the original push for Ms. was to avoid mistaking a married woman for an unmarried woman or vice versa. Ben Zimmer found the first known proposal for Ms. in a 1901 newspaper column (probably written by a man), which says:
“Every one has been put in an embarrassing position by ignorance of the status of some woman. To call a maiden Mrs is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title Miss.”
This is certainly a conundrum that I face often. Ms. is not (only) popular because women rightfully feel no need to disclose their marital status*, but because it offers a way for both males and females to address a woman whose marital status is unknown.
Of course, the QES has a counter-proposal to make Ms. unnecessary. They propose introducing an unmarried male title to complete the symmetry with Miss and Mrs. and then to make the choice of titles rely on age. Despite the QES’s claim that this is “so simple and sensible”, I think any reasonable person will see that this is a far inferior solution, and so I won’t bother with further comment on that numbskullery.
Summary: Ms. isn’t some recent feminist invention, it’s pronounceable, and it’s a useful addition to English. There is no reasonable reason to oppose it.
—
*: Not to mention that marital status isn’t all or nothing. What is the right title for someone divorced, widowed, separated, etc.? Ms. is a convenient way to solve that problem of etiquette.
Motivated Grammar 
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July 26, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Levi Montgomery
The one thing that “Ms” makes me regret is the lack of a way for a man to announce his marital status simply by giving his name. Men of the world, unite! We need a way to say “Why, yes, I AM married, as a matter of fact, for thirty years and proud of it!”
Or maybe not.
July 26, 2010 at 2:05 pm
dw
Do you really pronounce Mrs. as [məzəz]? I have only ever heard [mɪsɪz].
I don’t think I have ever heard the first [s] voiced as [z].
It’s possible that, with the weak vowel merger, that could become [mɪsəz].
I would expect [məsəz] from a New Zealander, with the KIT-schwa merger.
For that matter, I’ve never heard [mz] for “Ms”. I’ve only heard [məz].
July 26, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Gabe
dw: I only have a weak separation between [ɪ] and [ə] in unstressed syllables, so have trouble telling them apart. You’re probably right that [ɪ] is more accurate, so I’ve changed it above. I think the first “s” is often voiced as a [z], since it’s stuck between two vowels, and it’s hard to turn off voicing for a single intervocalic consonant. And I don’t hear a schwa in my own pronunciation of Ms., which is the same as the end of beams for me; if a schwa’s there, I think it’s a result of the temporary free-flow of air through my mouth between opening my lips at the end of [m] and getting my tongue in position for the [z]. Of course, it doesn’t really matter; the point of undermining point 2 is just that even if Ms. lacks a vowel, it’s still pronounceable.
July 26, 2010 at 6:08 pm
Mongoose
Actually, unmarried men used to be called “Master”, but it didn’t matter much since the proper way for men to introduce themselves at the time was simply their last name. Women introduced themselves as “Mrs. whoever”, and girls, I believe, by their first and last name.
Personally, I hate all of the above anyway. I don’t need to be called either “Mrs.” or “Miss”, and I think “Ms.” is both ugly and stupid. Of course in my demographic, none of them are used, but it pisses me off having to check a box with any of the above. If I have to have a “title”, it should be “comrade” or “citizen”. I prefer “comrade”, myself.
July 26, 2010 at 6:10 pm
CTR
When I was a child in Alabama, I did commonly hear ‘Mrs.’ with both z’s voiced; what that lead to, before certain last names, was pronouncing it with no vowel between the two Zs–that is, “Mizz” Smith–no different, aurally, from ‘Ms. Smith’, though distinguishable from “Miss Smith” if you happened to know she was single.
That is, if somebody with an Alabama accent seems to be overdoing the ‘Ms’, (as Rumpole does with Mizz Liz Probert,) he might instead be saying ‘Mrs.’ in a nice old way.
July 26, 2010 at 11:09 pm
pbrim
Another use of Ms is for those of us who do not use the same surname as our husbands, whether we retain our birth name, or use a hyphenated name that our husbands do not. To call myself Miss Brim implies I am nor married; to call myself Mrs. Brim implies my husband’s name is Brim. Neither is true. So what honorific should I use if not Ms.?
Or am I expected to go back to the days when a woman was just a Mrs tacked on to a man’s name or, if she was lucky, a parenthetical addition to his name, as in Mrs. John Doe (Jane)? Sorry, I decided that option was not for me about a half century ago and I’m not changing my mind now.
July 27, 2010 at 7:01 am
KellyK
Thank you so much for this. I *like* the existence of Ms. It only seems confusing and annoying because we have three ways of referring to women and only one of referring to men, but Ms. actually simplifies that. It fills a very important niche.
And I have to roll my eyes (a lot) at the bit about “certain” women and their “complexes.” Because wanting to be seen as your own person rather than an extension of your husband is *so* unreasonable. I’d like to go around calling everyone who came up with this and is married Mr. [Wife’s First Name] and see how long it takes them to develop a complex.
July 27, 2010 at 7:09 am
KellyK
Related to CTR’s comment, I’ve noticed that a lot of parents teach their kids to call unrelated grown-ups (like the parents’ friends) Mr. or Miss First Name. (So I’m Miss Kelly to my friends’ young kids.) The parents who do this seem to use “Miss” for married and unmarried women alike, so it kind of works the same way as “Ms.” (As far as I can tell…it might be that they’re using a southern Mizz, which is really Mrs., but it seems to be pronounced with an [s] rather than a [z].)
I *think* it’s a southern thing, or southern-ish, since I’ve only heard it in Maryland and often from people who grew up further south (one in particular is from North Carolina).
July 27, 2010 at 7:10 am
KellyK
Of course, the QES has a counter-proposal to make Ms. unnecessary. They propose introducing an unmarried male title to complete the symmetry with Miss and Mrs. and then to make the choice of titles rely on age.
So instead of making assumptions about marital status of people we meet in formal and professional situations, we’re supposed to make assumptions about their *ages*? Yeah, that’s going to go over real well…
July 27, 2010 at 9:28 am
Daniel
Gabe: FWIW, there is definitely a vowel in my pronunciation of “Ms.”, although it’s not the schwa that DW mentions (I pronounce it /mɪ:z/). I don’t recall ever hearing it pronounced with no vowel, and although I don’t question you I must say I’m surprised to learn you or anyone else pronounces it that say. For many names starting with multiple consonants, I imagine having no vowel between the /m/ and /z/ would create quite the mouthful.
As for the issue of widows, divorcees, etc., I have seen highly convoluted etiquette rules for proper forms of address for them. Depending on the current status, a woman who was born Jane Doe and married Richard Smith could be Mrs. Richard Smith, Mrs. Jane Smith, or even Mrs. Doe Smith (the latter being one form I’ve seen for divorced women). However, my experience is that different sources have different rules, so the end result is that the rules which are supposed to prevent offence actually create it. (I’ve been in that situation myself, because what I was taught was the proper form of address for a widow is what my wife’s grandmother was taught was only to be used for divorcees.) I personally think we’d all be better off abandoning “Miss” and “Mrs.” and just go use “Ms.” consistently for all women. There is simply no justifiable reason I can see for making the distinction, particularly since we do not make it for men. I’d also throw out the practice of using other titles (such as “Dr.”); I regard these as being every bit as anachronistic as the “Miss”/”Mrs.” distinction.
July 27, 2010 at 10:00 am
Gabe
Daniel: Great point about the etiquette rules. And as for the vowel-less [mz] pronunciation, I think I don’t pronounce a vowel when Ms. is unstressed, in a sentence like “It’s nice to see you, Ms. Doe.” If it were a sentence like “Ms. Doe, it’s nice to see you,” I think most of the time (if not all), I’d have either a schwa or [ɪ] in there, but a short one, not a long one. All of this I must say with the caveat that I am a syntactician and not a phonetician; these are impressions not based in observation but introspection, and there is no quicker way to discover a false truth than introspection.
July 27, 2010 at 10:13 am
CaitieCat
Another data point: UK-born, Canadian since 10, and I’ve got a definite short i (sorry, don’t have access to IPA on this machine – SAMPA /I/) in Ms (“mIz” in SAMPA), and definitely “s” rather than “z” in the middle of Mrs.
My partner, from Baltimore, has the same “Mrs” as I do, but has “mIs” for Ms.
It’d be interesting to do a poll on this; maybe I’ll go do that on my own blog.
Thanks for the great discussion, and for my pleasant surprise at finding such a feminist-positive post at my favourite linguistics-related blog. Like finding chocolate in my peanut butter. :)
July 28, 2010 at 5:27 pm
goofy
I’m surprised that you say /z/ is a syllabic consonant in English. (What other English words have a syllabic /z/?) This seems like a convoluted explanation for something that’s quite simple: the word does have a vowel. Isn’t “Ms” simply pronounced /mɪz/?
July 29, 2010 at 12:32 am
Dylan Stafne
Crap, I’ve been saying “Miss” when I read “Ms.”
I guess I sort of thought “Miz” was how anti-feminists mocked “Ms.” I didn’t know they were saying it correctly.
July 29, 2010 at 12:33 am
Dylan Stafne
Hopefully I’ve been slurring it enough so that the women don’t mind. :(
July 29, 2010 at 8:42 am
Gabe
goofy: Oh no, my point wasn’t that [z] isn’t a standard syllabic consonant in English but rather just a common syllabic consonant cross-linguistically, and that makes it reasonable to expect someone to be able to pronounce [mz]. English doesn’t have a lot of syllabic consonants, especially not in standard pronunciations of words; they mostly sneak into fluent speech, as with [n] for and. If you include onomatopoeia, then you do get some syllabic [z]’s in English: a bee buzzing (bzzzz) or a buzzer ringing (bzzzt).
The reason that I bothered with the argument of vowelless [mz] being pronounceable is simply that I do, in fluent speech, usually produce the vowelless [mz], and therefore wanted to explain the more objectionable position, figuring the vowelled pronunciation of Ms. could defend itself. I am quickly learning from everyone’s comments that this vowelless pronunciation is far less standard than I had thought, and I’ve really sowed confusion instead of clarity.
July 29, 2010 at 4:07 pm
goofy
Gabe: thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t think of “bzzz” but you’re right about that. In my defense my dialect has /mɪz/, and if I heard it pronounced to rhyme with “bzzz”, it would sound weird to me. But chacun son goût.
July 31, 2010 at 4:31 am
这周关于英文的链接 «Angry Editor
[…] American English? What’s that? | Macmillan […]
July 31, 2010 at 5:14 pm
The Ridger
Growing up in Tennessee we never knew if a teacher was married of not until she wrote her name on the board. “Mizz” was the way both were pronounced unless one was being very, very pre-cise with all one’s sy-lla-bles. (Of course, you never knew with the men … which is sort of the point of Ms.)
I particularly liked the Cinemark site that offered me the choice of Mr, Mrs, and Ms …
August 2, 2010 at 11:34 pm
Flesh-eating Dragon
The concept that “missus” “isn’t really a word of its own” is new to me: I’d swear I remember it being on spelling tests when I was at school. :-)
I’m also surprised the intervocalic [z] in your pronunciation. I would say [mɪsəz], or [mɪsɪz] if I were trying to sound British.
August 9, 2010 at 6:50 am
The Queen’s English Society deplores your impurities « Sentence first
[…] Gabe Doyle, at Motivated Grammar, finds the QES’s complaints “petty, insane, or both”, and takes a close critical look at their dislike of Ms. […]
June 2, 2011 at 1:53 am
starlingford
A friend of mine, who has more than a passing interest in stirring up trouble, argues that not only is Ms a dastardly attempt to prevent men from hitting on otherwise available women, ‘Mrs’ also really ought to have a possessive apostrophe – as in ‘Mr’s.’
He suggested this in the pub with a bunch of female postgraduate literature and linguistics scholars. One would be hard put to recall a more impressive and immediate flurry of blows and assaults in martial history than that which put my friend under the table…
June 26, 2011 at 3:46 am
Esha
When Ms(.) was new-ish and I was a copy editor on my college newspaper, we were told not to put a period at the end, because it wasn’t an abbreviation. Now I’m thinking that if it had had a visible vowel in it, maybe people wouldn’t have naturally added a period to the end of it so often. Anyway, it seems to work either way.
July 21, 2011 at 10:32 am
Academy of English? Ain’t no sense in it. « Sentence first
[…] “culturally entrenched agenda”. Lamb, by the way, approves of yummy mummy but presumably still disapproves of Ms.; the Academy calls it a “linguistic misfit” on a particularly silly page of sexist […]
October 19, 2011 at 8:12 am
AdoAnnie
@KellyK, my grown up daughter still calls the woman who cared for her Miss Deb.
And I have to go along with The Ridger on the Southern pronunciation of Mrs. One tends to slide over the s/z in the middle and right on to the z at the end, a rather drawn out Ms so that to most ears they are the same word. And the word Ms can almost have two syllables, sort of mee-usz, but slid together. But then that may be a little more Texan as many of our single written syllables can have more than one voiced syllable, “Y’all come back now, yu heeuh.”
April 5, 2012 at 9:33 am
Z
Gabe, I think even if you leave the vowel out of [miz], the syllabic consonant would be the nasal, right? (“Rhythm.”)
Growing up, I was taught that Miss was for unmarried women, Mrs. was for married women, and Ms. was for divorced women.
April 5, 2012 at 5:19 pm
Daniel
Z: Out of curiosity, where and when were you taught that? I’ve never heard the distinction set up that way before, and it almost seems to me that someone was bothered by attempts to create a marital-inspecific abbreviation and was trying to derail it by creating a distinction which they felt would be off-putting to most women.
April 6, 2012 at 10:07 am
Z
Daniel: I honestly think I learned that from my mother, and this was long enough ago (>2 decades) that I have no memory of how she actually explained it to me. Maybe in rural Indiana at the time, the only kind of woman who would want such a term would be the kind of woman who would get a divorce. I don’t know.
Oh, specifically where and when? Rural Indiana, 1980s.
And Gabe, I’ve decided that what I said above is wrong, and there’s almost no way that the /m/ could be syllabic consonant in That said, I’m still just having trouble finding a way to say that word without a vowel.
April 10, 2012 at 10:52 am
Gabe
Z: We’ll have to have a pronunciation party sometime and figure out exactly how it’s said. I’m pretty sure that I don’t put much of a vowel in if I put in any.
D/Z: I was never explicitly taught that distinction, but when I was growing up, that was pretty much the way it was, especially for my schoolteachers. I think all my “Ms.” teachers (a fairly small set, 2 maybe 3?) were either widowed or divorced or separated. One even started as “Mrs. J” when I was an underclassman and switched into “Ms. F” when I was an upperclassman.
April 11, 2012 at 8:33 am
Adrian
“Master”
Has no-one here heard that title for an unmarried male??
I remember receiving *letters* addressed to “Master ____” as recently as the 199Xs.
I learned ‘Miss’, ‘Master’, ‘Missus’, and ‘Mister’:
…4 titles for 4 possibilities—gender equality built right in.
April 11, 2012 at 1:16 pm
Gabe
Adrian: That’s gone from all but the most formal of Englishes, in my experience — and I say that as someone who affectedly called myself “Master Doyle” at times in my childhood. But from my experience, it’s more tied to youth than bachelorhood; I’d think it odd for someone to call me “Master Doyle” now that I’m in my late 20s, even though I remain unmarried.
May 1, 2012 at 7:21 pm
Kryss LaBryn
When I was young, our older British relatives used to send us parcels addressed to us kids as “Master Peter M–” and “Mistress Christina M–“. It’s a shame that that usage seems to have died off with that generation; we always felt that it made us sound more important than a simple, dismissive “Peter M–” or “Christina M–“.
Possibly from that, I always assumed that “Miss” was short for “Mistress” (and perhaps that’s where the term for a married man keeping an unmarried woman– a mistress– on the side came from? I shall have to look it up). “Mrs.” was short for “Missus”, and pronounced much the same way, but with more of a /z/ at the end than an /s/. That would be with a Western Canadian accent, mind you. Mind, now that I think about it, Terry Pratchett uses “Mistress Weatherwax” for the formal title for that unmarried worthy. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that “Missus” was short for “Mistress” before, although of course one talks of the “mistress of the household”. Mind you again, the masculine counterpart to that would be “master”, so there again we’d have “master” and “mistress” paired up.
I first came across “Ms.” in Grade Four (very early Eighties), with our teacher, Ms. Scales. She took quite a lot of time that morning to correct our pronounciation “Mzz”, slurring from the M to the Z without a vowel in there; she very much didn’t like us pronouncing it as “Miz” as it sounded too close to “Miss”. She then had to explain to us ten-year-olds just why it even mattered whether or not a woman’s title indicated whether or not she was married. I’m not sure we really grasped her argument (I certainly didn’t; I was just left with a faint impression that being able to tell if a woman was married or not just from her name was somehow a Bad Thing), but it seemed to matter to her a great deal.
To this day, I think she is the only woman I have ever encountered who insisted on using “Ms.”
How about we either drop all non-profession-specific titles such as Mr, Mrs., Ms., and Miss, and all just go by our names? Or perhaps make “Mister” non-gender specific and all just use it, regardless of age, gender, or marital status, if we feel we must have some kind of title there? Personally, as a married woman, I would find “Mr. Christina” far less irritating than the “Mrs. Mike” one person I know insists on using for me.
May 1, 2012 at 9:22 pm
Kryss LaBryn
From the QES website (the front page): “Put very simply, we refuse as a nation to adopt the word ‘sidewalk’ when there is already a perfectly good word — pavement, nicely settled in our language.”
Right. Thanks to that idiocy I almost got myself run over as a kid visiting Britain.
See, over here in Canada, we use the word “sidewalk” –the part on the side of the road where one walks– because we’ve already labelled the paved road itself with the perfectly servicable “pavement”. So when, as a child, I borrowed a bicycle from a kid who lived on a very busy road, I was going to take it for a spin down the sidewalk, until his mum very firmly instructed me to stay on the pavement. Not wishing to disobey an adult who seemed to feel very strongly about the matter, I ignored my own instincts for self-preservation and rode on the pavement– that is, on the road itself, on a blind corner, with traffic whizzing by uncomfortably close– until, after a hundred feet or so, I said “bollocks this” and unsteadily made my way back again, only to get reamed out by the mother who was extremely ticked off that I had endangered myself by disobeying a direct order to “stay on the pavement!”
“But I DID stay on the pavement!” ten-year-old me wailed, but it befell my mother, once I had explained the injustice of not only endangering my life but then getting yelled at for it, to go and straighten the matter out. “I wanted to stay on the sidewalk, but she made me ride on the pavement,” you see.
So bollocks to using “pavement” instead of “sidewalk”; we’re already using pavement to mean the paved part the cars drive on (as the sidewalk may as easily be gravel as concrete, over here), and I don’t see the need to endanger any other children’s lives by confusing the two.
May 2, 2012 at 11:00 am
AdoAnnie
I was visiting England for the first time and as I’d arrived rather late at my destination I told my host that I didn’t want to sleep too late to which he replied, “Don’t worry, I’ll come knock you up in the morning.” My traveling companion saw the look of shock on my face and said quietly, ‘knock on the door, he’ll knock on the door.’ What a tangled web we weave (to hack a metaphor) when we try to communicate in English.