The fact that the deputy leader of one of our main political parties is female and has the word "man" in her name is an endless source of amusement to the kind of person who thinks it witty to call her "Harriet Harperson". ![]() Some men just do not have the grace to admit they are beaten. The assumption that women's marital status, but not men's, should be included in the formal way they are identified is rightly becoming a thing of the past. A s long ago as 1911, the American writer Ambrose Bierce, in his satirical The Devil's Dictionary, objected to Miss – "a title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market" – and proposed that for consistency there should be a title for the unmarried man: "I venture to suggest Mush, abbreviate to Mh." We may have to wait a while longer for "Mh", but Ms, which I recall being greeted with ridicule when it started to catch on in the 1960s and 70s, is now well established.
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