The names, they are a-changin'

When Cleodhna and I got married, one of the questions people asked was whether she was going to change her name. I thought that was a silly idea; partly because it seemed a bit possessive (if this is a marriage of equals, why do I keep my last name but Cleodhna loses hers?), but mostly because it would deprive the world of a genuine Dr Nightshade. (It’s important to say “Dr Nightshade” in an evil super-villain sort of voice. You can’t just say it casually.)

This occasionally causes some confusion. A letter from our vet arrived the other day addressed to Mr & Mrs Nightshade, totally failing to identify either of us: I’m not a Nightshade, and she is, but she’s a Dr.

In this context, a BBC article addresses the thorny issue of whether people should be called Miss, Mrs or Ms, in the light of a pamphlet the European Parliament has issued asking staff to use “Ms” as a general-purpose title, rather than “Ms” or “Mrs”. Needless to say, this is like catnip to Eurosceptic Tories and the Daily Mail, and all sorts of positively ghastly people have been happily bellowing “political correctness gone mad”. The article mentions some pretty good reasons why you might want a title that didn’t bring up marital status, and you should read it; I’m more interested in the guy from Debrett’s Peerage and Aristocracy.

The article concludes:

For Charles Kidd, of Debrett’s: “It’s important to get someone’s title right. If someone does want to be called Ms then that’s fine.” But, he added, he had never been asked to change somebody’s title of address from Mrs to Ms. “I’ve just never heard of it,” he said.

Bear in mind that this is the same person who was quoted at the start of the article as objecting to people being called Ms Blah, saying:

“I was brought up to address a married woman as Mrs John Smith, for example.”

It seems to me that if you’re in the business of selling biographical dictionaries of important rich people, it may well be totally reasonable, given the sort of people you talk to all the time, to regret not addressing women as their husband’s chattel.

But if you genuinely haven’t have heard of a title feminists and post-feminists have been using for the last 30-odd years (Wikipedia reckons people started using Ms in the early 70s), why the hell should any normal person pay the slightest attention to you?