| 词组 | Ms. |
| 释义 | Ms. Ms. is a blend of Miss and Mrs. and seems to have been originally devised as a convenience for business use in addressing letters when the sender did not know if the woman addressed was married or not. The utility of such a designation seems to have been recognized as long ago as the 18th century; the OED Supplement (under certain) has a 1754 citation in which the writer wishes such a term existed. It took a couple of centuries for one to be invented. Once Ms. began to be used with some frequency, the feminist movement adopted it as a desirable honorific because, like Mr., it was unmarked for marital status. The result of this adoption was a certain amount of controversy, most of it of the unenlightening variety. Bolinger 1980 quotes a woman who says that Ms. has come to be associated with divorcees, widows, businesswomen, feminists, and some others of questionable social status, and that this has reduced its usefulness. Our evidence does not support this judgment. On the contrary, we believe that use of Ms. has become so widespread that it is now the standard form to use, especially in business correspondence, when a woman's marital status is unknown or irrelevant to matters at hand. One notable piece of evidence for the general acceptance of Ms. is that the New York Times, after years of believing that Ms. was not part of common usage, adopted its use in 1986 for references to women whose marital status is unknown or whose preference for Ms. is known. There are substantial treatments of the history and development of Ms. in Reader's Digest 1983 under Miss and in Copperud 1980 under Ms. |
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