With Ms. magazine about to celebrate its 40th anniversary in December (its first issue was a supplement to New York
magazine), this seems a good time to tip Lingua Franca’s collective hat
to the magazine’s and its allies’ remarkable success in deliberately
insinuating a new word—Ms.—into the language. To appreciate the
difficulty of that, consider the hundreds of unsuccessful attempts to
come up with a gender-neutral third-person pronoun that Dennis Baron has
tracked at his invaluable Web site.
One of the few other successes I can think of along this line is homophobic,
which the OED reports as first being used in a general context in 1975.
The word deftly psychologizes hostility toward homosexuals as springing
from fear of them. Well played. However, Ms. is a bit more impressive in that, unlike homophobic, it was offered as a substitute for two already well-established words, Miss and Mrs.
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