Antedating of "Ms."

[Shapiro, Fred]

Great work, Ben!  I knew that the Springfield (Mass.) Republican was covered by America's Historical Newspapers and tried to search for this article, but I gave up too easily.

Ben, do you have any hunch as to whether this is the actual coinage of _Ms._ or one of many independent coinages and perhaps not the earliest?

Fred Shapiro



________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Benjamin Zimmer [bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, June 23, 2009 12:29 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Antedating of "Ms."

Thanks to Fred's discovery, I was finally able to locate the original article in
the _Springfield Republican_ (of Massachusetts, not Missouri) on America's
Historical Newspapers. It's in on page 4, col. 5 of the _Springfield Sunday
Republican_, Nov. 10, 1901.

I report on the finding (and provide a scan of the item) in my latest Word
Routes column:

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/1895/

--Ben Zimmer


On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 10:49 AM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 9:41 AM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
>>
>> The OED's first use for the form of address "Ms." is from a Dec. 4, 1901 Iowa
>> newspaper. The Iowa article is referring to prior usage in the Springfield
>> (Mass.) Republican.  I have not  yet traced the original Springfield article,
>> but I have found an earlier other newspaper  reprinting the Springfield
>> article.  In the Newspaperarchive database, the Salt Lake Tribune,  Nov. 17,
>> 1901, p. 21, reprints the Springfield article, including the use of the term
>> "Ms."
>
> Good find, Fred. When I first discovered the _Humeston (Iowa) New Era_ cite, I
> assumed that its reference to the _Springfield Republican_ meant Springfield,
> Mass. Dennis Baron and I both searched through microfilm for the Massachusetts
> paper from late 1901 and couldn't find anything. But Stephen Goranson pointed
> out that it's very likely the Iowa paper was referring to the Springfield
> *Missouri* Republican. I tried getting microfilm for that paper via
> interlibrary loan from a Missouri library, with no success. If someone can get
> their hands on the microfilm, we now know to look for an article before Nov.
> 17.
>
> More on "Ms." here (with comment from Stephen G.):
> http://blog.oup.com/2007/10/antedating/
>
> --Ben Zimmer

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