5.28.2008

greetings and salutations

One of the less exciting things I've had to do at my new job is sort through some merged lists of contacts and delete all the duplicates. I spent some major hours deduping. I am sure you all are jealous.

Because deduping is such not-exciting work, I keep thinking about random things that show up in this list. Like, for example, how awesome is "Buffalo Nickel" for a street name? How do you pronounce Marylva? Why did that person decide to hyphenate Smith-Jones?

Some of the lists had salutations - maybe you call them 'prefixes' or even 'titles.' It's the Mr./Mrs./Ms./Miss thing. Sometimes I have to figure out if people living in the same house might be related, and how I should address them so we aren't sending 4 newsletters to the same family. That is about as exciting as this task gets.

I'm not as able to multitask as I was pre-fallingdownaflightofstairs, but I sure did get some good pondering in as I perused the list. Mostly I focused on the differences between Ms. Mrs. and Miss. By the time I'd graduated from college, I stopped using Miss because it seemed so juvenile and because I was working with academics who tended not to take "Miss Nonprofit Staff" quite as seriously. So I was Ms. for a while, when designating my own salutation. Wedding invitation etiquette demanded use of Miss a little bit, and I wondered if I was offending any women in a similar situation as mine - not married, but not wanting to tout the 'Miss' either.

How long as Ms. been around? I used to think it was a relatively new designation for divorced women. Miss was unmarried, Mrs. was married, Ms. was divorced. Widows somehow slipped under the radar - probably because I didn't know any and as a junior/high schooler, I didn't have much concept of mortality other than that of grandparents and other old people. (Granted, that all changed after Sarah got pummeled by an out-of-control Ford Explorer.)

I like being a Mrs. and I kinda 'miss' (pardon the pun) seeing it in front of my new name. I like being married, I'm proud of my husband, and I don't think it's a professional hindrance in my particular circles. Most people who write me are actually writing 'us' and then they put Mr. and Mrs. - but when it's just me, it's just me. So if you're ever in the mood to address something to me, tack a Mrs. in front of it, and really make my day. I wouldn't even mind dups!

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