SIGNIFICANT OTHER: Increasingly Significant Issue

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:52 PM -0700 4/10/02, Dave Wilton wrote:
>
>I know an unmarried, heterosexual couple who simply refer to each other as
>"my husband" and "my wife." They figure that's their social situation and
>their legal status is no one's business but their own.

I do too (especially when they're talking to service personnel rather
than friends), but this is a bit harder to get away with this when
the couple is not heterosexual.  This is sort of the opposite of
calling one's legal spouse "my partner".  I'm thinking here of a
prominent semanticist who mentioned once that she'd be bringing her
partner to a post-talk party at my house, and she was indeed
referring to her husband of 30-plus years.

Larry