A few months ago, I blogged about the perils of politically-charged title picklists, mentioning in part that we'd never had "Miss" requested as an option.

Better make that: we'd never had "Miss" requested as an option.

A supporter of one of our organizations wrote the note below to that organization, which forwarded the message to us for feature consideration:

I was a kid in the 70s when Ms. was introduced--not as an alternative word meaning the same thing as Miss but as a way of not reveal marital status. If the alternatives are just Mrs. or Ms., then Ms. had become simply a synonym for Miss that that non-married women use and that still reveals them as "not-Mrs." I strongly suggest that you add Miss to your list. Then those who choose to reveal their marital status can, but Ms. retains its value of being a equalizer for all of us.

Interestingly, the logic is basically the same as the inquiry featured in this blog in April -- that "Ms." with "Mrs." drains the former of its distinctive meaning as a social equalizer with the all-purpose "Mr." -- while coming to opposite the opposite remedy.

I think I heard somewhere that the personal is political.

We receive our share of unusual inquiries hereabouts. The other day, we got one ("bcc: many folks") prompted by this page and reading in part:

your first three choices for "Title" on your drop-down "Select Title" menu are:
--Mr.;
--Mrs.; and
--Ms.

This implies that you are using "Ms." as an abbreviation for "Miss," which is incorrect.

Furthermore, it is very discouraging to those of us who fought for years to eliminate the varieties of ways in which women are discriminated against, by our laws and by our cultural institutions.

A major tactic in this effort was the creation of a title for women (Ms.), parallel to that used for men (Mr.), for the purpose of denoting gender only and nothing at all about marital status, as a means of eliminating the institution of requiring that women identify themselves as either never-married or as [previously] married.

...

I BEG you, remove "Mrs." from your drop-down menu and stop requesting women to tell you whether or not they are-now-or-ever-have-been married. It is SO 19th-century, and it invites a renewal of discrimination against women based on marital status.

This was an interesting inquiry for us: we'd already removed 'Mrs.' once before.

Training -- though sometimes stressful -- is one of the best parts of my job, largely because of what I get to learn from people with completely different outlooks who pose incisive questions I would never think to ask.

On the orientation-to-Salsa webinars we've been running for current clients, I got a great question the other day about running reports to help campaign managers identify possible mistyped e-mail addresses so that they could manually correct them in the headquarters while the relationship was still retrievable.

A perfect occasion for both our custom report builder and a forehead-smacking "why didn't I think of that?"