#75 Ms. Junior

It was back in the eighties, when Wall Street went through its first spasm of plundering pension funds, eviscerating old companies and throwing all their experienced workers out into the street. Oh, excuse me, when Wall Street first went through its downsizing and restructuring strategies to make companies leaner. Oh, excuse me again, when the single best and lasting industry on the American economic landscape was born, the golden parachute industry.
Anyhow, it was back then that Rush Limbaugh had yet to invent the term feminazi for any behavior that he didn’t understand in women. Given Rush’s popularity in junior high and high school, that probably included quite a lot of un-understanded things. One of which is that treating women as fellow equal human beings shouldn’t be such a stretch for certain threatened macho types. It’s okay for men and women to be cranky; one of them doesn’t have to be a bitch.
It was back then our language was going through changes to reflect this equality. “Chairman” became “Chairperson.” “Men Working” signs changed to “People Working” and then simply to “Workers.” The word “mailman” presented a different problem, although the spelling was clear, the sound was a double dose of masculinity, containing both the syllables “mail” and “man.” “Mail-person” just didn’t work. “Personperson” sounded really funky, so everyone finally settled on “postal carrier.” The reverse was true with “stewardess.” People kept try to change it to “stewarder,” instead of just eliminating the female suffix and reducing it to “steward.” Everyone eventually became “flight attendants.” In spite of the sound problem, some words maintained their original use. “Hemorrhoids,” at first in danger of being delineated into “hem-orrhoid” and “her-orrhoids,” or worse, swollen into “person-orrhoids,” dodged the socially sensitive bullet. I use the term “socially sensitive” because the once non-value laden term “politically correct” is now used by some to sneer at any change that seems inconvenient or annoying to the conservative status quo.
But one word seems to have escaped it all: “Junior.” Yep, Junior, as in the former bitchy baseball baby we had in Seattle. As in, Junior High school. As in, Lieutenant, Junior Grade. As in, she’s my junior accountant. Seems pretty gender unspecific in these contexts. So why, when a woman is named Mary, and her daughter is also named Mary, do you never hear anyone calling the younger one “Mary Jr.”? Why do you never see the designation Mary Jr. on checks or legal documents or wedding announcements? Like John F. Walker Jr. is marrying Mary Bush, Jr. at St. Mike’s Cathedral.
And another thing, you had your Pope John Paul and you’ll have your Pope John Paul the Third. Why didn’t we call Pope John Paul the Second, Pope John Paul Jr.?
America, ya gotta love it.