A propos of nothing (social engineering version)

There's a real asymmetry between the English "Miss/Mrs" and, say, the German "Fraulein/Frau."

This is total armchair speculation devoid of actual etymology, but it's just hard to look at "Fraulein/Frau" and not see something structurally analogous to the "Haeschen (bunny)/Hasen (hare)" relationship: that is, knowing the rules of German, one can deduce from the relationship of the words alone that a Fraulein is a juvenile Frau -- and, of course, the former tend to be unmarried; the latter, wed. It's a correlational relationship. Whereas "Miss/Mrs," though it may have originally been similar, is now wholly arbitrary: knowing all the patterns of English wouldn't help you guess which word had which meaning. Interestingly, you can't even use the English words as nouns these days, except in proscribed and affected ways ("My missus said..."), even though I seem to remember one can speak of the Frau going to the market.

I tend to think that being trapped as a noun is a bad thing: being a woman driver is worse than being a female driver, and not just because of cultural opprobrium added to the former. A female driver belongs to the class of drivers and is tagged female; a woman driver is a separate class of things. What I -- and I do acknowledge, probably only I -- find interesting here is that the English "Miss/Mrs" marks only for marital status, whereas I'm guessing "Fraulein/Frau" marks a bunch of things including marital status. And I'm wondering whether that's why "Ms" caught on so well in the US but not so much in most of Europe (the concept of a unisex neologism, that is -- not the English word "Ms" itself).

I'm more receptive to a marital status marker that grew out of an age marker...except that I don't think there's a male equivalent. (Although, come to think of it, I've never heard a juvenile male addressed as "Herr." What are they called? Any German speakers want to help me out, here?)

I suspect that adding a male title for juveniles (and, by extension, for unmarried men) would be a good way to introduce parity, and more likely to succeed than trying to get support for a unisex neologism.

Might I suggest "Herrlein"? Not only does it maintain a pleasing symmetry, but it contains a useful mnemonic for all those English tourists and those many bilingual Germans: those that are one are more likely to have one.

My work here, I believe, is done.