ADDRESSING BUSINESS LETTERS

How do you address a business letter to someone whose marital status as a woman you don't know? Or, worse still, you aren't even sure whether the person being addressed to is a man or woman. Nowadays, there are quite a few names where gender isn't easy to decipher, such as Roop Gupta or Lakshmi Narayan or Madhu Misra.
Certainly many of us have at time been confronted by a letter sent by someone whose sex we had to guess - and guessed wrongly. The matter is not helped because many women in the business and official world make it a point not to disclose their gender in correspondence,which is understandable. With more and more women moving into business and professions, addressing of business letters correctly can be ticklish.
One suggestion to use the full forename-surname salutation without mentioning Mr or Mrs or Ms could begin with `Dear Roop Gupta'. Of course, the forename-surname salutation is reserved for correspondence at more intimate levels than with perfect strangers. But, this seems a sensible way out. The Katherine Gibbs Handbook of Business English permits it. `If it's not possible to determine the gender of the addressee, omit a courtesy title in the inside address and in the salutation.''
What about the situation where you know that the person to be addressed is a female but you aren't sure about her marital status? Faced with the difficulty between the use of Miss' and `Mrs' back in the 1960s, the feminists took up the word `Ms' pronounced as Miz (plural Mses). Unlike Mr and Mrs which are abbreviations, Mr has no spelled-out form.
The origin of the word again is not exactly known. Though it looks like a cross between Miss and Mrs, it's possibly derived from the word Mistress - defined as a woman who has authority, command or ownership, especially the female head of a family household or school.
Gloria Steinam, a prominent figure in the feminist movement and one of the editors of the magazine `Ms' has been particularly active in advocating that women use Ms with their names. To feminists, a woman's marital status is nobody's business and so a neuter term Ms is called for.
The word Ms is still fighting its way to widespread acceptability and use.It finds no mention in many a dictionary. The New York Times, for one, takes care to write Mr or Mrs after people's names has not accepted Ms.
T h e British are even more h o s t i l e to it. ` I t ' s a r t i f i - cial, ugly, means nothing and is rotten English. And far from disguising the marital status of women, as is claimed, it draws attention to it,'' says the well-known journalist Trevor Fishlock.
Jennifer Clarkson, writing in the Punch, made fun of Ms. ``Ms' hardly makes a word, it hasn't even got a vowel. Only two consonants, alone together, unchaperoned.'' She wants a real word with dignity, not the dental drill of Mizzz. Despite all the criticism and barbs hurled at it, Ms is providing an answer to the difficulty of using Miss or Mrs.
William Saffire, the noted linguist, supports the full forename-surname approach, such as Dear Mulk Raj Anand. To him `Dear Anand would be too obsequious, and `Dear Mulk Raj' over-familiar. Saffire feels, a full name would be the best when you want to address someone you do not know.

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