Lady vs. Woman

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. This is Rachel from Clipson Park, New York.

Hi, Rachel. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Rachel. What’s going on?

Thanks. Well, I have a question.

This question came up when I was traveling with a friend in Mexico, and we were staying at a youth hostel, and she was going to tell me a story about a conversation she had with another girl in the hostel.

And she said, I was talking to this lady in our room, and I got really confused because she was referring to this other person, and I said, that person is not a lady.

And the problem was, for me, the word lady has a connotation that the person has to be older, like above 40.

And she didn’t feel the same way.

So I thought it was really interesting.

That is.

And you referred to her as a girl just now.

Yeah, a girl.

How old is she?

Or a woman, maybe.

She was like 25.

25, yeah.

Okay.

And so you’re more likely to refer to females in their 20s as girls rather than woman or lady.

Yeah, definitely.

And my friend thought lady was more of a general term and went for any age.

That’s so interesting.

What’s her background?

Where is she from?

She and I are both 22.

Okay.

And she’s from Wisconsin, and I’m from upstate New York.

If she had said something about the woman, what was the sentence again?

I think it was I was talking to the woman or the lady staying in our room.

If she had said I was talking to the woman staying in our room, would that have automatically had an age denominator on it?

For me, that sounds good.

I think woman would have been more appropriate.

But she felt the opposite way.

And, Rachel, did you stop down the conversation then and discuss it for a bit?

Yeah, we did.

We both studied linguistics in college, so we were both pretty interested.

Aha, aha.

And so how did that conversation go?

What did you come up with?

Well, she said that for her that was the polite term, and she felt kind of the opposite way I did.

So I started polling other people.

I talked with two people who said that they felt the same way as me, that it was an old term for an older person, and two people said that they didn’t think so, and then it went for all ages.

Oh, that’s interesting.

I’m with you.

For me, lady is somebody oldish.

And by that I mean old enough to have a family, a career.

I’m thinking Margaret Thatcher.

Oh, are you?

Yeah.

I’m not thinking regal or anything.

Although, think about Beyonce and singing to all the single ladies.

Right.

Right.

And that’s interesting, too, because I was talking to my mom about it, and I said when it’s plural, it doesn’t seem to have the same connotation.

Only when it’s a lady or kind of singular.

Now that you mentioned it.

That’s right.

Yeah.

So it’s very context dependent, right?

It matters who you’re with, what you’re doing, and what you’re talking about.

All those matter a lot.

It also depends upon the context of perspective.

Are you in the company of that person or were you in the company of that person?

It also depends on the plurality.

One, more, many, few.

Interesting. But there’s another thing here. I want to go back to the connection between girl in age and woman in age and lady in age. I do have a woman as an age in my speech. If I call somebody a woman, it’s likely because they are mature, grown up. They have all the trappings of adulthood and not just physicalness, but not just genetics, but or biology, I should say, but what they do with their lives, how they comport themselves, those sorts of things.

A woman for me is like the full rounded, you know, has reached all levels of being a human.

Yeah, interesting.

I would switch it.

I would say that lady for me is a fully mature kind of woman in adulthood, maybe with kids and married.

And then that would be lady and then woman would be just very generic.

But it matters too.

I guess one thing I left out of my context was a man talking about women is very different than women talking about women.

I wonder if a man could have called her a lady and if it would have felt the same.

Well, and also I’m curious, I mean, you seem comfortable and a lot of people in their 20s I know seem comfortable referring to women as girls, which is somewhat offensive to some older women who grew up in the feminist movement.

But, yeah, I have a lot of friends in their 20s for whom that is perfectly comfortable.

But I wonder, do they refer to male people as boys?

What’s your experience with that?

Yeah, I wouldn’t.

Guys, I think, is the better generic term.

Boys seems very, like, kind of sending.

Yeah, isn’t that funny?

I was talking with a young man in his 20s the other day, and he mentioned this girl.

And I know he didn’t mean it offensively, but I’m betting that she wouldn’t call him a boy.

Right so girl so girl has kind of crept up to reach well into the 20s boy is kind of reduced down to what teens and younger yeah maybe younger teens I would say I wonder if there is a universal term that wouldn’t have some markers on it for somebody else misinterpreting it if there’s one term I mean you’d think that woman would be that but I I think that woman can be misinterpreted as wow.

That woman?

Yeah.

I love that.

I love that that woman, right?

Immediately there’s a judgment about that means that she’s the subject of some ridicule or some kind of appropriation.

Yeah.

And ladies is the same thing.

Like a single guy walking up to a group of women saying, hey, ladies, is like high on the creep meter, right?

Totally.

Yeah, you almost want to go to the genderless person if you really want to be without connotation.

Rachel, you’ve opened a can of linguistic worms, as all good linguistic students do.

Yeah, I’m really interested to see what people have to say about this.

Yes, and we are too.

And I’m sure we’ll get a ton of email and phone calls about this.

You can let us know, 877-929-9673.

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So, hey, Rachel, thank you for starting that conversation.

Thank you so much. This has been fun.

Take care now.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye.