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hedge-rambles · 10 months ago

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Another one that I've seen people get wrong is claiming that Mrs is derived from the possessive Mr's, showing that that a woman belonged to a man.

This is not true, which makes sense when you think about the fact it's pronounced like "misses" not "mister's". Miss, Mrs and Ms are all derived from Mistress, which was not linked to marital status, it's just the feminine form of Mister/Master (and in fact, originally Miss and Mrs were interchangeable too).

This school has instructed me to change all staff members that we have identified as 'Miss' to 'Ms.'

The salutations do not always mean the same thing.

#anyway I'd never heard the divorce thing either #because it's not a thing #it's funny how often we learn though that something we'd held as self evident our whole lives was just like...#a wrong thing an adult taught us when we were younger #I wonder if the youth pastor had got the wrong end of the stick themself #or was just lying to discourage/discredit the usage of Ms?#I've seen there are critics of the term out there who get annoyed because ''it doesn't tell you anything''#which is like uh yeah? that's the whole point?

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