very minor note on "lady"

[George Thompson]

        ***  Yesterday morning a well dressed female with her servant behind her, stepping up to a huckster in Washington Market enquired whether she had "any peaches proper for sweetmeats?"  "No, aunty, but I guess you may get some of that there lady with a pipe in her mouth, what sits opposite, and sells them savoy cabbages and blue nose potatoes."
New-York Evening Post, October ???, 1825, p. 2, col. ?  (mid or late October)

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.  Working on a new edition, though.

----- Original Message -----
From: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, April 14, 2011 4:46 pm
Subject: very minor note on "lady"
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> 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."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org