It may well not have been unheard of in 1952; but I hadn’t heard it, or at least hadn’t seen it written. It certainly wasn’t common in print; or as distinct from Miss or Mrs. in speech, at least in the Northeast. There was a lot of fuss in the 70’s when people started using Ms. in order to avoid specifying Miss or Mrs. Didn’t the New York Times hold out against it until something like the 1990’s? – 1986, apparently.
The link appears not to be paywalled.
– I note, however, that that article says Ms. was fairly common by 1970; so I may have been behind the times.
I would have taken the O. Henry usage as being a dialect spelling of Mrs.; though I might have been wrong.
I think that’s one of those things that somewhat specific to where and when you grew up. I started high school in 1977. * The only way I had of knowing whether a teacher was married or not was how she introduced herself. But I was going to use whatever title she used for herself - there was no way possible for me to use “Miss” for an unmarried teacher unless she introduced herself that way. Because if she introduced herself with “Ms”, I had no idea whether she was married or not.
* I’m specifically talking about high school because I attended a parochial grade school where I might have known the teacher’s marital status even if she had introduced herself as “Ms”.
When the designation first came out, the sit-com with the greasy “Schneider” character had a landlord (or maybe it was her boss) who insisted upon calling the main character “Emm Ess Romano”.
I write “Ms”, and I attempt to pronounce it “Miz”, but it often accidentally slips out as “Miss”. I’m still thinking “Miz”, but somewhere between my brain and my mouth, it shifts.
I think this is probably it. Say “jazz hands” or “razzmatazz” or “prismatic” quickly and as part of conversation, and there’s a decent chance the /z/ comes out as more of an /s/.
I think some people just don’t realize that “Ms.” is not an abbreviation for “Miss” and so pronounce it the same. Simple as that. That’s certainly what I thought growing up.
So I would consider “miss” to simply be a variant pronunciation of “Ms.”
That was Ms. Magazine; which may indeed have been the first place many people noticed it – in the fuss about the magazine, whether or not they read it.
Re: Ms, Marvel, It’s kind of weird. I assume that these people are professional voice actors with years of experience. It’s not like they’re going for some exotic accent. I don’t understand why they’re doing it.
Edit: Sorry this was supposed to be a general reply, not directed specifically to you.
I hear “Mizz” frequently, here in Georgia. It’s an honorific for late middle-aged to elderly women, regardless of their marital status. The bookkeeper at my store, for example, a Cayman Islander in her late sixties, is almost universally known as “Mizz Josette.” I most often hear it applied to African-American and African-Caribbean women, but not exclusively; I’ve heard it used for white and Hispanic women, too.
For that matter, co-workers in there twenties and thirties occasionally call me “Mister [Personal Name]”; I’m in my late fifties, have been in my position for over 15 years, and one of the go-to guys for procedural questions. I suspect that’s what’s behind the impulse.
I suppose ending a sentence with an abbreviation is not done very often anyway. If I were to do it, I’d just spell out the word: “I’ll have to ask the missus”, or “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, mister!” Et cetera.