Sunday, September 23, 2007

Euro Bikini Girls 063





White's anecdote touches on a phenomenon that others have remarked on as well. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in a difference reflected in Nancy Mitford's U vs. non-U distinction, lower class women strongly preferred to be called "ladies" while women from higher backgrounds were content to be identified as "women." Alfred Ayers remarked in 1881 that upper middle class female store clerks in his day were content to be "saleswomen," while lower class female store clerks, for whom their job represented a social advancement, indignantly insisted on being called "salesladies." Something of this sense may also be underneath Kipling's lines:

The Colonel's lady and Rosie O'Grady —
Sisters under the skin

These social class issues, while no longer on the front burner in the twenty-first century, have imbued the formal use of "lady" with something of an odour of irony (e.g: "my cleaning lady").


Source from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki


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