very minor note on "lady"

[Jonathan Lighter]

This information is probably available elsewhere, but it seems worth
mentioning. It will seem trivial to some.

OED finds it very difficult - understandably - to discriminate between
printed exx. of the bland _lady_ 'woman' and the earlier, more dignified
usage.

When I was a lad in NYC in the 1950s "lady" and "woman" were generally
interchangeable (except, of course,
in those special situations when one might say something like, "a perfect
lady" or "very ladylike," etc.). A girl could grow up to be either a "lady"
or a "woman": in that context the words were nearly as synonymous as "gorse"
and "furze." Outside of direct address, my impression is that actual adults
were far more likely to say "woman" than "lady," but young
whippersnappers said both (outside of direct address) with more or less
equal frequency.

However, when I arrived in Knoxville in 1974, I was amazed at how *rarely*
undergraduates used the word "woman," either in speech or in writing. It was
very noticeable. Every adult female was by default a "lady," in distinctive
and complementary counterbalance to a "man" (except when specifically
complementary to a "gentleman"). (Cf., e.g., "lunch lady"; "men and ladies"
was not an infrequent collocation; I'm tempted to suggest that the frozen
phrase "men and women" was almost the *only* time the word "woman" was ever
used, but that's probably an exaggeration). I also soon noticed that even
people well over 30 and 40 (back then) tended to replace "woman" with
"lady."

I suppose I may be overlooking some subtleties in both locales, but the
point is generally valid.

And the point of this note is that there are obvious, occasionally even
jarring, semantic features whose slow development and spread simply
resist adequate documentation.  That is certainly exemplified in OED's
treatment of "lady."

JL

"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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