Just when you thought it was safe to go out and play in the fields of gender, along comes Mx. The online version of the Oxford English Dictionary is considering adding this new honorific for those who are uncomfortable with assignment to one or another gender. Comparisons with Ms., another invented “abbreviation” that doesn’t really abbreviate anything, are inevitable. Commenting in The New York Times, Alice H. Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northwestern, suggested that unlike Ms., which was meant to “obscure personal details,” Mx. is intended “to highlight them,” a point to which I’ll return. First, though, I’m struck by the notion that we need honorifics at all. Am I the only one who plays with this demand — say, in filling out online details for an airline reservation, where I’ll spring occasionally for “Dr.,” not because I like to flaunt my Ph.D. but because a) I’m weary of what’s happened to the Mrs./Ms./Miss debate, and b) I have this fantasy that someone out there is tracking percentages of female doctors.
Apparently we have had honorifics for millennia. The Romans, for instance, used Dominus, Augustus, and Magister — the last of which evolved into the English term Master, which became Mister. By the 16th century, Master was being used (though not exclusively) as a title for a young boy, and Mister began its rise as a term for a gentleman. But in line with the trend toward professionalization, other, higher-status honorifics grabbed hold, leaving Mr. as the default term for anyone who claims male status. I’m sure I am not the only professor who attended college when almost all the faculty were male and were referred to as “Mr. Smith,” etc. But in my 30 years of teaching, I have usually been addressed as Professor, except by the few students who prefer to call their college teachers Doctor.
Because I was brought up to write, for instance, “Mrs. John Smith” on the envelope of a letter addressed to Mary Smith, I’d always thought that Mrs., short for Mistress, stemmed from a married woman’s status — that it meant, essentially, “Mistress of John Smith.” Not so, according to several etymology sources. In the 14th century it was used to denote a woman who took charge of a child — a governess or a teacher. It could also be used to refer to a sexual partner, or in general, used with a woman’s given name, to refer to any female. Its short form could be spelled Miss. Only as the abbreviation Mrs. began to be pronounced missus and thus to separate from the word mistress did it acquire a meaning limited to married women and quite distinct from what we mean when we speak of a man’s mistress. At about that same time, Miss became relegated to the realm of unmarried women.
The point of all this etymology is that we didn’t start out with our current definitions for Mr., Mrs., Ms., and Miss. One of the unfortunate developments in the half-century since Ms. was coined has been certain agencies’ tendency to designate it as a term for a formerly married woman or for a woman using her name professionally — in other words, to return to Alice Eagly’s phrasing, precisely to try to highlight something about the user of the honorific rather than let stand its status as a simple counterpart to our current use of Mr. We are also a very long way from eliminating the use of Miss and Mrs.; since 2000, the use of both those honorifics has risen sharply, while the use of Ms. has remained flat. It’s this development, rather than a newly invented status for those who are transitioning between genders or who consider themselves “gender queer,” that makes Mx. interesting to me.
Other non-gender-specific options are, of course, available. There are the various egalitarian honorifics—Citizen, Comrade, Friend. There is the occasionally used single initial M., which has the misfortune of being the French abbreviation of Monsieur. There’s doing away with honorifics altogether — since America is supposed to be a class-free society (no smirks, please), why should the airlines or anyone else force us to append a title before a person’s name? But as anyone who has written a highly formal recommendation knows, continually repeating the applicant’s first and last names feels robotic and tiresome; reverting to the last name only feels denigrating; and using only the first name can seem overly personal or informal. So an honorific is a handy device.
Which brings me to my last point. Whatever its origin, I would prefer that Mx., if we adopt it, be available to all human beings. I see no reason why its purpose should be, per Prof. Eagly, to “highlight” personal details. About the proliferation of options this occasions I have no useful suggestions. Personally, I wish Mrs. and Miss would go the way of Magister. Perhaps in a few more centuries.