Miss Manners: Parsing the feminine honorifics

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I understand the proper usage of “Ms.,” “Miss” and “Mrs.” as you have written about it, but what about “Mizz”?

I have heard this title used 1fairly often at my old elementary school, by a mix of teachers and students. It was a verbal title, never a written one.

I would have passed it off as a mispronunciation, had I not heard a fellow student explain it thus: “ ‘Miss’ means unmarried, ‘missus’ means married, and ‘mizz’ means it’s none of your business.”

While I would never want to snoop into a lady’s personal life, I also see no reason for anybody to be ashamed or embarrassed of their relationship status. Could you please inform me what the proper usage of this title would be?

GENTLE READER: “Mizz” is not a separate title, but a perhaps slightly southern pronunciation of “Ms.”

But Miss Manners wonders: Do you folks go around making snarky interpretations of “Mr.”?

Oh, that’s right – you can’t, because it is an all-purpose honorific for all gentlemen, regardless of whether or not they are married. So you can’t accuse them of being ashamed or embarrassed.

“Ms.” accomplishes the same thing. Like “Miss” and “Mrs.”, it derives from the once-respectable title of “Mistress,” which applied to all ladies – and was driven into disuse by just the sort of snarkiness you repeat.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: This holiday season has been a particularly bad one for thank-you notes at my house. Even though we did receive a few actual notes, the vast majority did not send one, and one person even said, “We don’t do that”!

We also got two hastily written emails and a Facebook post, including some that didn’t acknowledge the gifts at all.

Has this become accepted practice? Do you think they are giving me a message that they don’t want gifts in the first place?

I’m not asking you to tell me how to get them to write notes; instead, I’m asking if I’m expecting too much from people in this electronic and busy world.

GENTLE READER: There certainly are people involved here who expect too much. They are the recipients of your generosity, who expect it to continue without any gratitude on their part.

It will be acceptable to ignore presents when it is no longer accepted to give them.

So Miss Manners agrees that your offerings couldn’t mean much to people who have no response to them, and that you should stop annoying them with your generosity.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: While I agree that not saying “thank you” is rude, I don’t see why that should mean that we stop giving them gifts. Choosing to give a gift is about the giver, while failing to say “thank you” is about the receiver.

Should we lessen ourselves as givers because we did not get a response to our generosity? Do we give only to get a response?

GENTLE READER: Presumably, you give in order to please the recipient. If you have no reason to think you have succeeded, Miss Manners sees no point in persisting.