Quite possibly — as are Miss and Mrs., the “sexist” honorifics that Ms. was meant to replace. Is the two-letter honorific she helped to popularize in the 1970s — a decade of feminist ferment — soon to follow? “When you have socio-cultural change and you have economic change, you’re going to have language change,” Tagliamonte says. Author and language expert Patricia T. O’Conner predicts that gendered honorifics will all but disappear from the written language. Though language tends to follow cultural, economic and technical developments, it can provide the flashpoint for opposition against those trends.

Source: thestar July 16, 2017 10:52 UTC