One of the lesser-known perils of becoming a school teacher is not breathing second-hand vape mist (mango tango!), or working out why your students keep chanting “6-7” like small communists. It’s working out how you’ll be addressed.
It began casually. After starting work at my school, another teacher was writing the updated list of names for the staff room door. “Are you Miss or Mrs?” she said. I wanted to be a “Miss”. It has a youthful vibe, like “Miss Anne of Green Gables”. I am legally Mrs, which makes me sound like a 20th-century matron, or a formidable mother, like Mrs Wormwood from Matilda. “Just say Ms,” I said, keen for the slightly edgier “zzz” sound. I can’t bring myself to be a “Mrs” for reasons entirely unknown, except that it makes me feel old.
Miss, Miss, Miss … what’s in an honorific?
When I was young, teachers were either Miss or Mrs based on their marital status. The ones who went by Ms were the equivalent of Facebook’s one-time relationship status, “it’s complicated”, their mysterious monikers the equivalent of a dramatic post-breakup haircut – losing that softening ‘R’.
Male teachers, on the other hand, are always “Mr”, which now feels deeply unfair: why should women continue to be defined formally by their marital status? At least we’ve moved on from the dark ages, when letters would come in the mail addressed to my parents: “Mr and Mrs Peter Lee”. As a child, I always found that confusing, wondering if my mother’s legal name was actually “Mrs Peter Lee”.
It turns out that students don’t care much for your official title most days, calling out “Miss” to get your attention (which works for me). It’s the 21st century and the age of choose-your-own-adventure identity: I identify as a Miss – footloose and fancy-free. But I started to wonder: What do we do with all these honorifics in 2025? Are there still rules?
Loading
It turns out the honorific “Ms” emerged in a newspaper column in 1901, where an anonymous writer proposed: “There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill.” The writer explained that unless advised on a woman’s marital status, you were put in the “embarrassing position” of having to guess, and heaven forbid, you grant someone the “inferior” title of Miss. The correspondent then suggested “a more comprehensive term which does homage to the sex without expressing any views as to their domestic situation”, namely, “Ms”.
These were ye olde equivalent of your pronouns, and much debate took place about them (if you were a woman), but maybe this should be reignited. It was only in 2022 that Wimbledon officials dropped the honorifics traditionally applied to female players. While men were recorded only by their first initial (N. Djokovic), female players, such as Ash Barty, were recorded as Miss A. Barty.
In 2023, Harris Westminster Sixth Form, a UK school which, based on its name, sounds like it would have no trouble embracing formal titles, announced that students were banned from calling teachers “Miss” or “Sir” in an effort to battle the “cultural misogyny”, probably because “Miss” continues to sound like a 19th-century nanny, compared with ye honourable “Sir”.
