Ms., Martians and Guacamole: Their First Time in The Times

It feels as if they’ve been around forever. But for everything, there’s a first mention in The Times. Here are 15 surprising debuts, from bicycles to the Big Bang, apartment houses to vaccines. Oh, and maps in color, too.

How the editors missed Ms.

It took just two consonants and a period to create an honorific that didn’t define women by their marital status. This was an elegant solution to a vexing problem, but it would take many decades for The New York Times to consider “Ms.” a proper form of address, which the paper finally did in 1986 — 15 years after the debut of Ms., the magazine. Yet the salutation was first proposed at the turn of the 20th century, by a newspaper in Springfield, Mass.

“There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill,” declared a 1901 editorial in The Sunday Republican, suggesting “Ms.” as “a more comprehensive term” for women than “Miss” or “Mrs.,” one that “does homage to the sex without expressing any views as to their domestic situation.”

The item drew a small flurry of press attention, as the lexicographer Ben Zimmer later detailed, but “Ms.” didn’t take hold. Then in the early 1960s, a 22-year-old civil rights worker named Sheila Michaels noticed it on a piece of mail — her roommate’s subscription to a Marxist journal — and began to quietly lobby for its use.

Her efforts didn’t amount to much until late in the decade when she and others were invited to discuss the women’s movement on WBAI, the progressive New York City radio station. During a lull in the conversation, she began to expound on the virtues of “Ms.” As it turned out, a lot of women had tuned in.