Posted on 03/15/2005 6:53:19 PM PST by neverdem
The silences don't tend to last long, but they do happen. I would just reassure your children that the internet glitches quite a bit as well (it does!) and that a communication blackout doesn't always mean bad news.
Last summer, the radio unit on the satellite dish on my camp fried and we were without communications for nearly three weeks. Oh, we could go across the base and use the MWR center, but those were jammed and it was more of a hassle than it was worth. We just did it to e-mail or call people back home and tell them about our communications failure to prevent them from worrying.
It won't be bad. You'll be able to communicate pretty well almost all of the time.
Huh? Are you confusing Ms. with Miss? Like it or not, Ms. has been the equivalent of Mr. since the 1970's. In professional environments and particularly in the media, you can't presume what someone wants to be called...so you go with the neutral. The reporter interviewing the subject would likely have been referring to her as Ms. Unless she corrected the reporter at the time, of course they'd refer to her as Ms. in print.
Ms. may be accepted in journalistic or academic circles, but I can tell you for a fact that many of the ladies I know are insulted when they are called Ms.
Did the journalist even ask what the Colonel's wife wanted to be called? Or did he/she assume it was okay?
Yeah, what you said. My husband said it helped him to know we could take care of ourselves, as he didn't have to worry about us so much and could focus on the tasks at hand (this was early in the war, when things were even more dangerous). Not in a million years would I waste five seconds of one of his precious phone calls home to whine about ANYTHING. Whining on a phone call from Iraq about the mundane at home is IMHO unsupportive, wasteful, selfish and childish.
One gal I know, an RN, is the wife of another reservist RN who is now serving as a corpsman on a Navy vessel at sea. There is about zero chance that this guy is going to get hurt, but his wife is hysterical. Called him up whining and crying because the cat had a urinary tract infection and peed on the bedspread. Can you imagine anything so stupid? It's not like she doesn't see urine every day. And she can't decide what chemicals to put on the lawn, and can't decide what needs fixing on the car. Poor man! Some women just won't grow up. And then we complain about men not growing up!
I think you'd find it acceptable in most business/professional situations too. The reporter probably addressed the woman with Ms. at that point the person then comments on whether they'd prefer another form of address. I don't think anyone purposefully uses it with derision in mind. Of course there's always the chance that a reporter might ignore the request to seem politically correct.
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