A reader has asked Kevin Myers to explain when journalists use Ms, Miss and Mrs. Reader, you might as well ask Martin McGuinness to discuss Burke's Peerage or the captain of Crossmaglen Rangers to describe the leg-before-wicket law.
Apart from when discussing it, I have never used the term Ms, and I never will, except, of course, as shorthand for manuscript.
The insertion of the term Ms in the English language was the first great linguistic triumph for feminism. It showed that, even when being illogical, feminists could nonetheless get their way. For women already had two titles - Miss and Mrs - and men, of course, only one - Mr. To give women a third title was itself a declaration of enduring inequality; but it also gave them the chance to get all huffy and make a political statement about their name.
Even for the girls, three titles was too complex, so common usage again largely reverted to two: Mrs and Ms, with Miss in public life departing into the small cupboard marked "beauty competitions". However, some unmarried women who dislike feminism pointedly retain the word "Miss", and some married women insist on being called Mrs. All of which misses the central truth about titles: they are not what you call yourself, but what other people call you. This is classically summed up by the French graduation from mademoiselle to madame, which is done for you, not by you.
However, the sisters wanted Ms, and Ms is what they got. Yet it really makes no linguistic sense, and indeed, it even fails to achieve the intended sense of full female independence, for of course its origins are the same as those of Miss and Mrs, which made two journeys from the one source into the English language. That source was the word "mistress", which is simply a feminised version of the word "master", which in turn came from the Latin "magister", a male authority figure, usually a teacher.
In other words, Ms simply means a she-man, so it has achieved nothing in terms of creating a language of genuine female liberation; but it does enable broadcasters on RTÉ to buzz their politically correct credentials with a tiresomely sisterly sibilance: MZ. It's a profoundly irritating sound, like hearing kilted, bearded Scotsmen singing "Oh Flower of Scotland" as if they're doing something brave and important, when in fact all they're doing is bawling about two unfortunate packs of serfs hacking one another to death in some god-awful bog.
Ms however, did manage to scare the wits out of lots of journalists. If a woman is found guilty of even the most heinous crime, she'll often enough be referred to in court reports as "Ms", though a guilty male - the skunk! - will be referred to by his surname only. Moreover, the title is seeping downwards: many newspapers showing photographs of 14-year-old girls caption them "Ms", though of course, boys of the same age never receive a comparable courtesy.
The correct term for an under-age girl is Miss: but the sisters get all restless at that term - "ten thousand years of bondage!" - and naturally, men, as always, have capitulated. With some anguish, I noticed Dermot Gilleece in last weekend's Sunday Independent repeatedly refer to a 14-year-old she-golfer as "Ms Wie". That's ridiculous. She's an athlete and a young girl: as the former, she goes by her unadorned surname; as the latter, by her first name, or by her second, with the title Miss. Would a boy-golfer of her age be referred to as Mr?
Still, I suppose we should be grateful we're still allowed even to use the word "girl". Some American feminists a few years ago deemed it to be "offensive to women" - whatever the hell that whingingly precious term means - and tried to get it replaced with the term "pre-adult females". Happily, that campaign failed; yet it was not entirely without issue, for it does at least tell us what a humourless, irony-free landscape is populated by much of the sisterhood.
Which, of course, doesn't mean the sisters always fail. So, though bad enough as it to use Ms about athletes, it is frankly farcical and counter-factual to employ it historically. Yet that's precisely what happened in the recent press coverage of the court case involving the performance rights of the songs of Delia Murphy, who died in 1971, long before the term was invented. Even its date of minting is scarcely relevant, for public figures from the past are usually referred to by their surnames alone.
Ms has become the flagship word of feminism, and it symbolises how the English language has been cravenly re-ordered around the feminist agenda - so much so that it's almost impossible nowadays to use the word "man" at all, and many males simply describe themselves as "persons". Ugly confections like chairperson and spokesperson have displaced streamlined terms like "chairman" and "spokesman", though these certainly didn't refer to men only.
The great, the magnificent Margaret Downes, always refers to herself in her accountancy chairing roles as "chairman"; on the other hand, the somewhat lesser personage, Gerry Adams, in his curiously thin autobiography, describes how in the 1970s he became "chairperson" of some committee or other - the Falls Road Gilbert and Sullivan Operatic Society, I think, or perhaps the British Legion.
No such term in those days: but in every other detail, his account of his life in the 1970s was 100 per cent accurate; oh yes, and my name is Ms Constance Markievicz.