Judging by the tone of the arguments here - sexism is alive and well still but in the form of anti PC rhetoric. Why do we have so many young women starving themselves to fit an unrealistic body image? Why do women not feel normal unless they remove virtually all of their body hair? Why are women still defined by their appearance or age? Why is it not OK for women to let their hair go grey without dying it? Why do women filmstars eg Susan Sarandon feel they have to have total surgical facial reconstruction in order to get parts in films? Why was it treated by some media as such a big deal that the director of The Hurt Locker was a woman? How many women directors have ever won an Oscar? Why are NZ women still paid less than men for doing comparable work. Why did Key's government throw out pay equity? Why is "Michel Laws is a Tw*t" the title of a Facebook page? Women still have a long way to go and many have forgotten how far they've come.

'Miss' implies 'on the shelf, can't get a man'. Evokes pity.

'Mrs' = defined in terms of her husband. Sometimes leads to: "Can I speak to the bill-payer?" assuming the husband is in charge of everything.

Ms - gets comments such as 'You one of those feminists, then?'

It's demeaning.

Bloke books his car in for a service, (for eg), or rings a utility company, garage doesn't effectively ask: "Are you married?" or "Are you the head of the household? when filling in the paperwork.

But otherwise, it's things like childcare issues (taking career breaks, not being able to work limitless hours) that stop women 'getting to the top,' not language.

Throwing a curve ball is nothing to do with rugby, it's a baseball term. And apart from that, what a terrible article.

Trish, it sounds like it's you're own insecurities that are the problem. And you know if you put Ms, no-one can tell if you're married? They probably couldn't care less anyway.

After you've finished butchering the English language, perhaps you could start on Spanish. You could spend your life removing all the a's and o's that denote feminine and masculine and replace them with e's that are gender neutral!

zocor #5 It's not that I find the words offensive (and yes of course wife, daughter, husband etc is fine). It's the requirement to say what my marital status is when all they want is to establish on their records if you're male or female, and whether to adress any mailouts to Mr or Ms etc...

Young girls are happy to be called Miss and happily married women are usually proud to be called Mrs, but it's a different story when neither of those things are the case. For a woman who is married but has been widowed, separated, cheated on or just unhappily married (or divorced), or is single and past the age where one is expected to be married, the Miss/Mrs/Ms question is annoying and also confusing as to what to put. A simple gender question becomes awkward, embarrasing or downright upsetting, and all for no good reason.

As a man, unless you are directly asked if you're married (which could sometimes be a valid question), then you've never been put in this situation, so would have no idea how it feels.

Perhaps if the term Master meant unmarried rather than young, and you applied some of these situations to yourself, and imagined being faced with it every time you fill out a form, then you might get some idea of what it is I object to.

Trish #3 "Imagine if men had to fill in forms asking if they were Mr or Master" Actually Trish, as a bloke it wouldn't bother me a jot, I'm more concerned about children and fathers human rights than mere words that some women, for whatever reason find offensive. However, imagine if my wife (is that still ok to say?) and I, were introduced as Master and Mrs Zocor, it's more than likely that again, it would be my wife who would take unbridge than I. Employers, for example, can derive certain unspoken impressions from whether one is, or is not married, that may be illegal, or unwise to actually ask out loud, so sensitive are some of us today. So do we continue to bastardize the english language for the sake of the gender challenged, or tell them to join the rest of us, grow a brain and "Cry them a River?'

I don't understand how using metaphors to describe the business world as a battle ground is being sexist. Given the number of women serving with front-line troops around the world, I would suggest that anyone thinking that "only men go into battle" is being sexist themselves.

As for what feminism has done to the English language : I grin every time I hear a man or woman referred to as a Chair. It makes me wonder how many legs the person has.

My pet hate is filling in forms and having to show my marital status. Men don't have to do this. It's particularly distressing when your marital status is not as it should be.

Surely it's time all forms simply said Mr/Ms rather than Mr, Miss, Mrs, Ms. It's the gender they want, rather than establishing if we're married or not, isn't it?

I generally use Ms these days, but I wish it was pronounced Miss (rather than the awful Mizz), and used for all females regardless of marital status. After all, we don't say Mirr for Mr, and that simply denotes a male, regardless of whether he's married or not. It's not quite the same inference, but imagine if men had to fill in forms asking if they were Mister or Master John Smith! I'm sure they would find that pretty demeaning.

'These days we rarely talk about a manageress, a poetess, an authoress, a directress, or an usherette. These terms trivialise the work of the women they refer to.'

Rubbish! Take a look in any decent dictionary and you'll find that 'ess' is 'a suffix for forming nouns denoting females'. It doesn't say anything whatever about the triviality or otherwise of their work. Rather, it says something about Janet Holmes' biases and prejudices.

This is the sort of PC tripe which is destroying the subtleties of the English language.

When men were in the accendance, women would claim discrimination and oppression, which incidentily could, and was, continued until women succeded in overtaking them? So why is it not oppressive to men now that women control many of these positions. No one speaks of the "Glass Ceiling" that men face in the Politically Correct world, as if women are so inclusive and nonsexist, that they are incapable of discriminating, which flies in the face of reality. The American Revolution was for the freedom of "Men", meaning individuals and women as well and led to capitalism. The French Revolution was for the freedom of "Man", meaning mankind and women as well, but that small change of a word, led to the Guillotine and Communism. Playing with words, such as Equality and Equity, which in the case of the Feminist Movement gave rise to the imbalance men now suffer, are very important and should not be played with by disengenous, Accademics or Feminist Megalomaniacs, who's lust for advantage shows no bounds nor shame.