词汇大师-- 'Ms.' Has a Longer History

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: our language-hunting friend Ben Zimmer has been tracking the origin of the female title "Ms.," which, unlike Mrs. for a married woman and Miss for someone who's single, does not indicate marital¹ status. Most people assume it came from the feminist² movement of the nineteen seventies. But thanks to digital newspaper archives, Ben has just located a proposal published more than a century ago.  

　　BEN ZIMMER: "So there was an article in the Springfield Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts, on November tenth, nineteen-oh-one. But I wasn't able to find the original article for quite a long time; I was only able to find discussion about the article. It ended up getting reprinted in newspapers around the country."
AA: "Why don't you read us a little bit from that article?"
BEN ZIMMER: "It starts off by saying 'There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill. Everyone has been put in an embarrassing position by ignorance of the status of some woman. To call a maiden³ Mrs. is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title Miss. Yet it is not always easy to know the facts.'"
RS: "And this was written in November of nineteen-oh-one."
AA: "Do you have any idea who wrote it?"
BEN ZIMMER: "Unfortunately these newspaper items were unsigned so we don't know who the actual author was. Very likely a man, but the title of the section that it appears is Men, Women and Affairs. Springfield, Massachusetts, was actually a place where there was a lot of what's called first wave feminism -- so, for instance, the women's suffrage⁴ movement, where they were lobbying for women to have the right to vote. So it was active in terms of early feminism.
"But we could see from this article it wasn't necessarily a feminist argument that was being proposed. It was more just a practical solution to save yourself the social embarrassment⁵ of calling an unmarried woman married or vice⁶ versa. So it wasn't until later, much later, in the seventies really, that it became identified as something that had to do with the feminist movement and a proposal that had more to do with trying to have a non-sexist alternative to Mister, the male title, abbreviated⁷ Mr., which does not make reference to a man's marital status."

　　RS: "And Ms. became the name of a magazine."
BEN ZIMMER: "That's right. That did a lot to boost the profile of the title Ms. when Ms. magazine -- which was associated with the women's liberation movement -- was first published in nineteen seventy-one."
AA: "You know, it's interesting, because the English language obviously goes back centuries and we've had these distinctions of Miss/Mrs. for, I assume, quite a long time. Why did it take this long for someone to come up with a solution, and were there earlier attempts at finding a single term for a woman who might be married or might not be married?"
BEN ZIMMER: "Well, these titles have really changed over time. And, in fact, the term Mistress, which is actually where Mrs. comes from originally. Mrs. was originally an abbreviation of Mistress, but that became pronounced as missus even though it retained the r in the abbreviation. Mistress was one title that in certain places in the U.K. or the U.S. could possibly refer to a woman regardless of marital status. But there wasn't anything over all like that. In general this distinction between unmarried woman and married women was maintained.
"A lot of that had to do with the fact that when a woman married, she was expected to take the last name of the husband, and so you moved from Miss Smith to Mrs. Jones. Well, this is another thing that changed quite a lot, particularly in the nineteen sixties and seventies with the feminist movement, where more women were retaining their maiden name. And then it didn't really make any sense to use Miss or Mrs. if a woman is married but has not changed her name to her husband's name."
AA: Ben Zimmer writes about language as executive producer of the Web site visualthesaurus.com. And a style point here -- even though Ms. is not an abbreviation, it appears with a period in most American usage. And that's WORDMASTER for this week. Archives are at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

1 marital   

adj.婚姻的，夫妻的

参考例句：

• Her son had no marital problems.她的儿子没有婚姻问题。
• I regret getting involved with my daughter's marital problems;all its done is to bring trouble about my ears.我后悔干涉我女儿的婚姻问题, 现在我所做的一切将给我带来无穷的烦恼。

2 feminist   

adj.主张男女平等的，女权主义的

参考例句：

• She followed the feminist movement.她支持女权运动。
• From then on,feminist studies on literature boomed.从那时起，男女平等受教育的现象开始迅速兴起。

3 maiden   

n.少女，处女；adj.未婚的，纯洁的，无经验的

参考例句：

• The prince fell in love with a fair young maiden.王子爱上了一位年轻美丽的少女。
• The aircraft makes its maiden flight tomorrow.这架飞机明天首航。

4 suffrage   

n.投票，选举权，参政权

参考例句：

• The question of woman suffrage sets them at variance.妇女参政的问题使他们发生争执。
• The voters gave their suffrage to him.投票人都投票选他。

5 embarrassment   

n.尴尬；使人为难的人(事物)；障碍；窘迫

参考例句：

• She could have died away with embarrassment.她窘迫得要死。
• Coughing at a concert can be a real embarrassment.在音乐会上咳嗽真会使人难堪。

6 vice   

n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的

参考例句：

• He guarded himself against vice.他避免染上坏习惯。
• They are sunk in the depth of vice.他们堕入了罪恶的深渊。

7 abbreviated   

adj. 简短的，省略的 动词abbreviate的过去式和过去分词

参考例句：

• He abbreviated so much that it was hard to understand his article. 他的文章缩写词使用太多，令人费解。
• The United States of America is commonly abbreviated to U.S.A.. 美利坚合众国常被缩略为U.S.A.。