Use Alone As A Form of Address
"Miss" is the proper form for addressing all young ladies. It is sometimes used for younger adult woman, for example, "May I help you, Miss?" In the United States, "Ma'am" is more common for all adult women regardless of marital status, as it may be taken as patronizing, and it is presumptive to assume marital status based solely on apparent age. "Miss" alone is often used by schoolchildren to address female teachers regardless of marital status.
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Famous quotes containing the words use alone, form and/or address:
“... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“This conflict between the powers of love and chastity ... it ended apparently in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure.... But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge—if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“If you address a ghost as “Thing!”
Or strike him with a hatchet,
He is permitted by the King
To drop all formal parleying—
And then you’re sure to catch it!”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)