“So its own proponents view the ?natural development? as re-education for the sake of a cause that goes against nature. If you?re lazy, the feminist language just slips right away.”

This is similar to what David Shipler wrote in his liberal screed on race relations, “A Country of Strangers”: “This is the ideal: to search your attitudes, identify your sterotypes, and correct for them as you go about your daily duties.” For truly committed liberals, the IDEAL way of life is to be constantly re-constructing your own normal thought patterns. Instead of resisting your sins, you resist your racial stereotypes, or, in the present case, your tendency to speak in correct English.

I also have noticed a return to normal gender usage by Americans. For example, in internet newsgroups dealing with computer-related issues, many people who you wouldn’t expect to do so correctly use the generic male pronoun to refer to an unspecified person. This has happened for the entirely sensible reason that there is no viable substitute for the generic male pronoun. Referring to an unspecified person as “they” sounds illiterate, at least in written communications, while the repeated use of the construction “he or she” required for consistency is so awkward that people immediately lapse into the more colloquial “they.” Thus, using “he or she” consistently would require something like this: “If a person finds that he or she has trouble eliminating his or her racial stereoptypes, he or she should get help from a diversity counselor.” People NEVER write or speak like this. Instead, they end up saying: “If a person finds that he or she has trouble eliminating their racial stereoptypes, they should get help from a diversity counselor.” This mixed usage is so awkward and undesirable that people have started naturally to gravitate back toward the standard, generic use of the male pronoun: “If a person finds that he has trouble eliminating his racial stereoptypes, he should get help from a diversity counselor.”

(Of course, once a person abandons the attempt to eliminate standard English from his speech, his mind may clear up sufficiently so that he might also start questioning the need to eliminate racial stereotypes.)

A couple of things:

Way back when I was first discovering VFR several months ago, a blog entry (whose title completely escapes me at the moment) prompted many readers in the ensuing thread to send examples of ways NOT to accede to leftist- and PC-inspired changes in what had been the traditional “style-book” rules of proper personal address, etc., for editors and journalists. I remember, for example, that in that thread Mr. Auster reminded us of what had traditionally (“pre-PC”) been considered the acceptible newspaper style-book rules covering when to use “Miss” and when “Mrs.” in referring to women whose matrimonial status was not yet known, or even in certain cases when it *was* known but one was nevertheless supposed to refer, for instance, to a married woman as “Miss” — I remember sometimes, before PC, seeing, say, Hollywood movie stars (like Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor), or top opera singers for example, being introduced on TV or referred to in print as “Miss” when everyone knew they were married. Other readers than Mr. Auster sent other examples, the spirit of the thread being to share ways of avoiding PC’s “stealth victory via sly incorporation of itself into the very language we speak every day.”

Does anyone remember the URL of that blog entry and thread? I’d like to glance through those suggestions again, and make a copy this time, for future reference.

Also, can anyone state exactly what the traditional “pre-PC” newspaper, magazine, and book-pubishing style-book rules were in regard to the proper use of Miss and Mrs.? I never knew them exactly, though I was already in early adulthood when PC began to take over in earnest.

Finally: I’m willing to admit (just barely) that women’s lib isn’t one hundred percent wrong about everything it touches.(**) If there is a good reason for switching to a feminine analogue of the “maritally-neutral” form of address — “Mr.” — which is used for men (and maybe there IS some good reason?), can’t we do better than the invented term, “Ms.,” which seems to have no etymological roots? The reason I personally avoid using “Ms.” where possible has to do not just with my opposition to most of women’s lib in the first place, but also very much with my distaste for that particular neologism, on grounds of linguistic esthetics and etymology (or, lack thereof).

(**) For example, one of women’s lib’s early proposals was that no woman should get married without first having a legally-binding marriage contract drawn up stipulating who owned what, who got what, and who ended up with what in the event of a break-up of the marriage. Many traditionally-minded people felt this recommendation was perhaps “a bit much.” At the time, I was in the process of reading the Icelandic Sagas, such as “Njal’s Saga,” “The Laxadaela Saga,” “Egil’s Saga,” “St. Olaf’s Saga,” and several more (I’m not sure of the spellings of the first two here). I must’ve read about eight or ten of them, some (such as Njal’s Saga) quite long. In them many, many marriages take place and are described in detail as regards the surrounding circumstances. All without exception involved a pre-nuptial marriage contract specifying division of property among the betrothed, soon-to-be husband-and-wife. (All were written in the early middle ages.)
My point is that some of women’s lib’s recommendations did seem to hearken back to what actually was originally something traditional in Western societies.

I first encountered “MS” in the 1950s when I worked in an office and noticed that, where a letter was to be sent to a woman whose marital status was unknown, she was addressed as “MS” because those were the two letters common to “Miss” and “Mrs.” Using those two letters avoided offending a woman who might have been given the wrong title. I therefore believe that the origin of the title was innocuous. It’s fair to assume that the feminists simply adopted it for their own purposes.

Another thing they’ve adopted is the phrase “the women’s movement.” I once wrote to a prominent feminist historian and asked her whether The Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America weren’t women’s organizations, yet obviously not meant to be included in the phrase “the women’s movement.” So, what should they be called? I suggested that the accurate term for the feminist movement was “the feminist movement.” She politely thanked me for my comment and wrote that the usage had become customary, so she accepted it. That’s bad enough, but how is it that conservative pundits don’t recognize that, by using it, they’re implying that the feminists speak for all women? Yet one often sees the phrase “the women’s movement” in conservative journalism.

I used to use “Ms.” to address a woman whose marital status I didn’t know, until someone pointed out to me that it was entirely unnecessary. He said that if you don’t know the marital status of the woman, you should simply address her as “Miss.” If she wants to correct you, she can. So that’s what I do (and so far, no one has complained.) That’s one small step back toward a traditional human world, and away from the artificial, reconstructed world that liberalism has imposed on us.

Unadorned could probably find the entry he’s thinking of through the search function.

“Unadorned could probably find the entry he’s thinking of through the search function.”

Mr. Kalb, thanks for that suggestion. It worked. The blog entry was “Why Conservatives Call PC Tyranny Silly,” posted June 17th by Lawrence Auster. Here it is:

http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/000499.html

I’m old enough to look at “em ess period” as a radical novelty that I still can’t bring myself to use, but I’m noticing that “Miss” looks a bit strange and quaint when I see it now. But as I remember the usage of “Miss,” it filled the position of an honorific for prominent women who went publicly by another name than their married one. Elizabeth Taylor was always called Miss Taylor because that was her professional name (and you could never remember whether she was married or to whom at any given moment anyway). When I was hanging around Objectivists, they always referred to Ayn Rand as Miss Rand, never as Mrs. O’Connor. This suggests that there was never any need to invent the em ess period neologism. “Miss” already existed for the purpose and “Mrs.” could have simply been retired. Sometimes I think PC language is a game of Simon says, and the important thing isn’t what Simon says, but who gets to be Simon.

“Sometimes I think PC language is a game of Simon says, and the important thing isn’t what Simon says, but who gets to be Simon.” — Dwight Decker

Mr. Decker, in a way, has hit the nail squarely on the head I think.

I didn’t realize that “Ms.” has political connotations. I thought it was an abbreviation for “Miss.”

Kim wrote, “I didn’t realize that ‘Ms.’ has political connotations. I thought it was an abbreviation for ‘Miss.’ “

It’s not, Kim. Though this is not any sort of big deal in the overall scheme of things, “Ms.” happens to be a neologism fraught with politics and extremely “symbolic,” as are most linguistic issues in the world of PC. PC is not something straightforward and natural, but heavily symbolism-laden — which has to do with why it must be strenuously enforced at every turn. Left to itself it would shrivel up and die out.

But whyever did you imagine such a short word as Miss needed an abbreviation?

As a youngster in school, I was taught that “miss” was pronounced “Miz”. Is this correct?

Feminists introduced the use of “Ms” so that there would be a pronoun for women that doesn’t give away marital status, as the Miss/Mrs pair does. It was thought to be unfair that men were not categorized by everyday pronouns into married and not-married, while women were.

The tyranny of political correctness has a long herstory.

Which is to say, “Miss” is properly pronounced as it is written, not as “Miz”. :-)

I am learning English and I need to send an e-mail asking for information to an unspecified person, however I do not know how to adress this person. Shoul I write Dear Miss/Mister?