Mind your language
`SO WHY,' I asked my husband, `do you always write this lady, instead of this woman, in letters of referral?'
`What?' he replied, throwing the lat- est issue of Aggressive Behaviour really quite close to the wpb.
But they do, according to my sister-in- law — doctors, I mean. Indeed she was once, in a letter of referral, called 'this unfortunate young lady', itself an unfor- tunate reference for anyone familiar with Pope's elegy.
Once my husband had recovered his journal and his temper, he said it was what they had been taught by his prede- cessors. That may be, but it doesn't stop my sister-in-law being offended by more than a few similar usages. She attributes it to the habit of regarding women as things rather than people: her worst example was: 'The wife is taking Julian to school,' where the son and heir is given a name and his mother is referred to on a level with 'the dog'.
Even in designating people by their jobs there is a disparity between men and women. You hear dinner-lady, lol- lipop-lady, cleaning-lady; you even hear lady policeman. For males it is the milk- man, postman, dustman; there is no gen- teel alternative, such as milkgentleman or lord-postman. If there is a distinction by status, it will be to call the game- keeper (to a third person) `Mr Pember- ton' — an indication that he does a valued job and you are not to tread all over his pheasant coverts, or wherever pheasants are reared, even if you are a gent and he ain't.
I've just come back from accompany- ing my husband on a conference in Spain about rheumatoid arthritis, and I found that they still have their own diffi- culties with honorific references, four decades after the anthropologist Michael Kenny wrote about them in his alarming study of city and village life in Castile, Spanish Tapestry. The latest thing in the new Spanish Cabinet is Senoras Ministras — 'lady ministers'.
I fear, to judge by your letters, that we shall be returning to this subject.
Dot Wordsworth
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