here is a bit of weirdness

[miriam_e]

The title Mrs, referring to a married woman, is pronounced as mis' iz, but that is just a traditional slurring of the word mistress which is what Mrs is really an abbreviation for. But the title Miss, meaning an unmarried woman, is also an abbreviation for mistress. It gets even stranger though: many women now prefer to use the title Ms which leaves undisclosed whether the person is married or not. Oddly, it too is an abbreviation for mistress.

The craziness of gender politics. :)

Comments

[alecto23.livejournal.com]

Because Brewer's is still sitting on my desk, distracting me:

Miss, Mistress, Mrs. Miss used to be written 'Mis' and is the first syllable of Mistress. Mrs is the contraction of 'mistress' and is pronounced 'Missis'. As late as the time of George II (r. 1727–60), single women used to be styled Mrs, as Mrs Lepel, Mrs Bellenden and Mrs Blount, all unmarried women mentioned by Alexander Pope (1688–1744).
Mistress was originally an honourable term for sweetheart or lover ('Mistress mine, where are you roaming'), and in the 17th century Miss was often used for a paramour, e.g. Charles II's 'misses'. Mistress has since come to mean a woman who has an extramarital sexual relationship with a man.
A further development is Ms, pronounced 'Miz', as an abbrevaition of either Mrs or Miss, designed to avoid distiunguishing between married and unmarried women. This title first arose in the USA in the 1940s.

The entry finishes with an anecdote from the New York Post about Nixon preferring to address women as "Mrs" or "Miss", a sentiment the journalist obviously shares.

[alecto23.livejournal.com]

Please ignore my typos. It's so easy to make them when the desk isn't big enough to hold a big thick book and you have to crane to read it as you type.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

How odd that the usage of the abbreviations has actually reversed!
And I had no idea 'Ms' was as old as that. I'd assumed it started in the 70s.