February 13, 2017 • 33 mins
The word "lady" has undergone a reclamation of sorts in recent years, but it still carries a lot of baggage, thanks to its gender-loaded etymology. Cristen and Caroline get down to the history, use and varying meanings of what it means to be a "lady" today.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you. From how supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, or should I say hey ladies, Welcome
to the podcast. Hey ladies, ladies. We are going to
talk about ladies, ladies, ladies today as we well, we
(00:26):
always talk about ladies. We always talk about ladies, but
today we're actually talking about calling you ladies. And if
if that's okay, is that okay? I hope it's okay,
because hey, ladies, is what our sminty tote bags say. So, uh,
you know, if if we can't, then I'm going to
have to. We're gonna have to make some holes in
(00:47):
some tote bags, I know. And then it won't tote anything.
We'll only tote very small things or one large thing.
They won't slip through exactly. But anyway, but anyway, this
topic came from a listener letter, which once we read it,
we were like, oh my god, this is a great
topic of conversation. Why haven't we talked about this before.
(01:08):
It was a listener writing in saying that she finds
herself calling referring to herself and to her friends who
are girls or girlfriends as ladies, and how she knows
that her second wave feminist mother would be horrified by
the thought. She's saying that growing up in her household,
(01:29):
lady and especially lady like were bad words, Oh for sure.
And I and I totally get that the whole, the
whole explanation around that kind of generational difference. I know,
my mother, who was part of No Wave, uh, calls
herself a girl, calls her friends girls. I mean, she's
(01:50):
in her you know, she's in her mid sixties. But
what about lady lady? No, I do definitely use the
term lady. I think of it as a term of endearment,
and I totally get that it probably has ironic roots
among our generation. But yeah, I totally use the word lady.
It's kind of a term of endearment. Yeah. And there's
been a lot of talk of this resurgence of lady
(02:11):
and ladies, particularly among our generation of women. You have
Lady Gaga, for instance, two thousand and eight, the Beyonce
single All the Single Ladies, which will now be stuck
in my head for the rest of the day. Then
there's more recently the Book of Jezebel, which is subtitled
the Encyclopedia of Lady Things, and over at the New
(02:34):
Republic there is the journalist and freedman who posits that
lady the word lady, the term is kind of serving
the purpose of filling that limbo space between girlhood and womanhood.
Maybe it's a softer term. It's more all encompassing for
(02:54):
our generation, and it fits well with the Britney Spears
two thousand two songs, Uh not a girl, not yet
a woman? Well yeah? And also think about for guys,
they have guys. You don't have to say, choose between
calling a group of adult males boys or men, or
boys to men. But whereas with adult women in particular,
(03:17):
you have the more formal women. And it does feel
formal to say hello women, yeah, even though that's proper.
But at the same time, girls can be infantilizing, particularly
if it's not a girlfriend you're talking to, right, And
I do have to make a conscious effort to try
to stay away from saying girls, or I was hanging
(03:39):
out with this girl, or oh I know this girl.
It's just it's second nature. It just comes out of
my mouth like that. And I and I absolutely recognized
that I should get away from that, and so in
a way, lady helps out. It's sort of the the
female analog to guy. But let's go back in time.
Let's unload this very old and loaded term that is lady,
(04:04):
because we'll lead up to why people of say, our
our listeners mother's generation, who went through the women's literation
movement might not take so kindly to ladies. Right. I
love I love etymology in general, but I love the
origins of the word lady. Okay, So it emerges around
(04:26):
the year twelve hundred from the old English term meaning quote,
mistress of a household, wife of a lord. Okay, that
makes sense, right, But it's literally taken from the word
for a woman who needs bread, also loaf eater. And
of course I immediately saw that were like woman who
(04:47):
needs requires bread because she likes the tasty snack, not
needing as in massaging the dough with your hands. When
I told dude roommate about that, he was like, oh,
who needs it like loves bread And I was no
pushing it around with your hand. All the side note
on how delicious bread is and women's shoes with bread
these days, Oh lord, I know with my thyroid stuff
(05:09):
that I'm trying to cut back on gluten and it
is a tragedy. Yeah, maybe that's another episode bread ladies
and bread and ladies and Christans. Um. Yeah, I I
really love that image of women historically just hanging around
massaging balls of dough. Uh. But then once you get
into the early fourteenth century, there's a chivalry twist on it,
(05:34):
so you have lady implying a woman as an object
of chivalrous love. And the fifteen eighties that's when we
see the term lady like emerge. So we can we
can pin a lot of bad things to the fifteen eighties. Uh.
In seventeen eighty four the term ladies man emerges, Hello
(05:56):
the old ladies man. And then by the late eighteen hundreds,
lady has been commonly adopted as a term of address
for a woman, and its specifically though suggests quote a
woman whose manners and sensibilities befit her for high rank
in society. So there's a lot tied up with lady
in terms of class, social rank, and even implied among
(06:20):
that talking about race as well, right and background. This
time in Ladies Home Journal looks into this issue and
decrees that woman meant merely an adult female of the
human race, Lady meant someone wellborn and consequently well bred.
In other words, lady grew to mean a woman plus education, refinement, dignity,
(06:41):
and culture. And so from that people who might think, well,
what's wrong with lady? What wouldn't what woman wouldn't want
to be considered an educated, refined, culturally astute woman lady, Well,
probably women who don't want to be pigeonholed and forced
to act in a certain way. Yeah, because that's the thing.
(07:02):
If you think about agency in lady and how that's
constructed being lady, like I imagine a woman sitting with
her hands in her lap and her ankles crossed. Whereas
if you look, for instance, at lord, the you know,
the male analog to lady, it's very active. It literally
means going back to the dough kneading and all these
(07:25):
bread bread words. It literally comes from a word meeting
one who guards the loaves. So the lords are doing
the loaf guarding and the ladies are doing the loaf
needing and eating. I love it. Yeah, but yeah, so
so you can see right there that there is an
(07:45):
active role in a more passive submissive role tied up
in this whole lady business. Um and Elizabeth read Boyd
in her book Lady Still a feminist four letter word
highlights the double bind basically of being put up on
a pedestal and yet still expected to be that submissive character. Yeah.
(08:06):
Linguists Robin Lakeoff, who we said it before in the podcast,
wrote a paper all about this in nineteen five called
Language and Women's Place, and it comes up a lot
this paper does in this conversation around women in more
of a feminist context, because Lakeoff writes, quote, if she
refuses to talk like a lady, she's ridiculed and subjected
(08:27):
to criticism as unfeminine. If she does learn, she is
ridiculed as unable to think clearly, unable to take part
in the serious discussions in some sense, as fully less
than human, right exactly. And she also points out that
the word lady is tied into job titles that uh,
you know, traditionally are more blue collar. Uh, and this,
(08:51):
she says, underscores their low status things like cleaning ladies,
garbage ladies, lunch ladies, et cetera. And she says, hey,
there is no there's no equivalent for men. You don't
have a garbage gentleman. Right, you just have a garbageman, garbageman,
John Garbageman, John Garbageman, or a salesman. So this is
one of the main reasons that this more recent reclamation
(09:13):
of lady by millennials. And we'll talk to this this
actually isn't as new as we might think, um, but
this reclamation of lady is upsetting to second waivers, some
second waivers at least like Robin Lakeoff, because in the
pursuit of women's rights and gender equality in the nineteen
(09:34):
six season seventies, part of that was actively striving to
get rid of the term lady. They did not want
to be referred to as ladies because of all of
those passive connotations, right. And Lakeoff was quoted in stories
about this recently, and you know, they were like, well,
you wrote all this stuff about language about women. You know,
(09:55):
what do you think about this this upsurge in calling
women ladies or women calling each other that? And she said,
I you know, its alarm bells go off. It's it's
something that in my generation we always considered considered it
a problem. We had to overcome it, we had to
get rid of that word. And now our daughters and
granddaughters are throwing it around basically, right. She was basically saying,
if you have been around forty years ago and walked
(10:17):
in our shoes and bell bottoms, you'd get what we're
talking about. Gloria Steinham also has been quoted as talking
about how she has a fear of quote unquote looking
lady like. It's like one of one of the worst
possible things Um and then interviewing feminist writer Catha Polite
for her new Republic Peace and Freedman, quotes are saying
(10:39):
that ladies like lady parts, lady, business, lady writer, etcetera.
Started out as quite humorous and ironic, but overuse has
made it cliched and affected. I don't know, do you agree.
I mean, I think it's definitely everywhere, But I mean
Catha Polite is another person of like Robin lake offf
and Lord Asygnum's generation who has been around to see
(11:03):
this evolution of lady from being a mantle that they
cast off actively to being one that you and I
now casually adopt. Right, But I'm wondering, like I wonder
if we can think of this in a parallel way
to remember when we did our episode on up speak,
you know, and how both men and women of kind
(11:26):
of all ages, but really of kind of older generations
look at that as a an immature way of young
women and younger generations speaking, even though it's not really
confined to just young women. I wonder if it's being
dismissed as affected or clich because younger women have embraced
the use of the word lady, right, because I can
(11:48):
understand how using lady and up speak all the time
can seem like maybe it's undercutting yourself. There you go,
You see what I'm saying. But I do think there
are still some holdovers, lady holdovers that could be considered
problematic still today, for instance, there was a column in
USA Today by Christine Brennan talking about how we need
(12:11):
to retire lady from sports team names. So, for instance,
the University of Tennessee has the Lady Balls, or you
have the LPGA Tour. I mean, these aren't ladies out
on the basketball court. And yeah, they're not still wearing
their woolen skirts that fall to the fall to their shoes.
You know. These are these are athletes. These are women
(12:32):
who could snap me in half and beat me up
if they wanted to, like these these people are are
accomplished athletes. Yeah. Well, and so that's the case where
it's that more formalized use of lady that that seems
like something that's okay to get mad about. You know,
as far if we're talking about the you know, using
the term lady and when and how to use it,
(12:54):
it seems almost dismissive. And you know, like that you're
patting me on the head for being a tennis player
or a golfer. Um. You know, I want to be
if I'm a professional freaking athlete, I want you to
call me a woman. I'm a woman. It almost seems
like labeling me like a ladies tennis player. That's I'm
I'm just going to eat cucumber sandwiches all day. Well,
it's the whole thing too. If you're a professional athlete,
(13:14):
you probably just want to be called an athlete or
a tennis player rather than a lady whatever or a
woman whatever. And there's this blog called female Science professor Um.
She talked to a bunch of her students about this
topic and it really her blog past really highlighted the
generational divide I think in this argument because a lot
(13:36):
of the women in her classes, the ladies in her
classes in their twenties and thirties, women who are smart, accomplished, savvy,
all of that great stuff, they still call themselves girls.
They call their friends girls. And not only that, but
they think of their male peers as guys or the boys,
you know. And these are women who are smart, you know,
these are are women that she came to to be like, Okay,
(13:57):
what what do you think? You know, I trust you
to be smart women and give me a smart answer,
and they're like, yeah, you know, we really don't think
of it like that. Whereas the blogger, the female science
professor um said, I must be in an in between
generation then, because my my grandmother and my my older
aunt they call themselves the girls, they call their friends
(14:19):
the girls, Whereas I UM am of this generation where
you know, that's just not what you do. Yeah, I mean,
And you could look at that too in the context
kind of like with athletics, where stem is another area,
as we've talked about so many times now on the podcast,
where even today it's often more male dominated, and so
(14:40):
especially in environments like that, there's usually been historically more
of a persistent struggle to shirk off those female specific identifiers. Sure, yeah,
and she points out that, and some of her commenters
also point out that one of the problems is not
so much women calling each other girls or ladies, but
(15:02):
when you have male faculty who are calling their female
students the girls, and their male students men or young
men things like that. Yeah, I mean, I feel like
girls is almost a whole another conversation because I have
no problem usually with men, even if I don't know them,
and even in professional context, referring to women as ladies.
(15:27):
But if I don't know you, and especially in a
professional context, if you call me a girl, I will
not be happy about that and I might say something
to you about that. Um So, just a little side note.
So in our conversation up to this point, we've been
talking about this reclamation of lady is kind of a
given fact as something that has already happened, And going
(15:50):
into this episode research, I assumed that the whole lady
fest going on was a more recent product, maybe um
perpetuated by the lady blogs like Jezebel, the Gloss, the Hairpin, etcetera.
But it's actually been happening for a lot longer. So
(16:10):
we're gonna get into that reclamation of lady, how it
happened and who really started it when we come right
back from a quick break and now back to the show.
So we've given you the history of where lady, the
term lady comes from, why people are totally in the
right to be upset about the use of the word
because it indicates a whole lot of baggage. It's kind
(16:32):
of a loaded word. It's very loaded, very loaded. But
let's let's move forward into the eighties when the term
lady first started to be reclaimed. Yeah, this was something
that I found over at Idiot magazine and it talks
about how in nineteen nine, Queen Latifa's single Ladies First
(16:54):
was an early and significant reclamation of the word, and
particularly considering it's racial implications, because one thing that we
haven't really touched on in our conversation about lady up
to this point is how Yeah, there's obviously a lot
of class tied into it, but there's also this racial
component where a lot of times historically ladies would be wealthy,
(17:17):
upper class white women. Right. Yeah, if you think I
know that I have that stereotype when I think of
the word lady, not in terms of a term of
endearment for my friends, but I tend to think of
like a Victorian white lady with her hair in a bun. Yeah.
And Juliana Escobado Shepherd, writing over about this in Rookie Magazine,
(17:37):
says that it as in the use of lady in
Queen Lativa's Ladies First, democratize the use of the term
for Black women and also queered the meaning of lady
through lyrics and dance that confronted and defied rather than
charmed and seduced. And I do want to say a
side note, if you need a little feminist pump up,
just don't only listen to Ladies First, but watch a
(18:00):
video because it is nine fantastic. Uh So that's that's all,
just just my music minute. So in a way, Queen
Latifa's Ladies First was almost a dual reclamation because I mean,
if you if you go back into the racist history
of how white society conceptualized black women, particularly in like
(18:23):
Reconstruction America, as not ladies at all. I mean, you
have the hyper sexualization of black men and also the
hyper sexualization of of black women as well. So, um,
Elizabeth Boyd writing in Lady is It's still a four
letter word? She talks about how the term black lady
has been deeply embedded in the cultural imagination as the
(18:45):
moral icon of the race, embodying and upholding African American respectability.
So the term lady has been quite significant in the
African American community. And so then in nine when you
have Queen Latifa kind of flipping and reversing it to
borrow Missy Elliott, Uh, it was it was pretty significant because,
(19:06):
I mean, think about it when she talks about how
they are ladies who will kick it and with a
rhyme that is wicked. I mean they're like playing with
it so much and using lady not just as this primoralizer,
but someone who is active and you know, like Shepherd
says in Rookie, defying norms and standards rather than following norms. Yeah,
(19:29):
lady can be a source of strength. You can be
a lady and be strong. That that is the new meaning.
I would think, yeah, absolutely, and and certainly Alison Wolf
would agree. She is a riot girl. We've talked about
the riot girl movement on the podcast before and lead
singer of rat Mobile, and she talks about how in
her women's studies class during her freshman year of college
(19:51):
she would always use the terms girl or lady in
reference to women, and she says, I can't tell you
how often I was corrected in class by other female else.
Finally I just stood up and said, Hey, I'm in
my teens and girl is what I choose to call myself.
Isn't this about self representation? Yeah? This was out of
an article in Bitch magazine from the early two thousand's
(20:12):
about the reclamation of lady but more tying it to
riot girl because the girl with three RS and riot
girl is it was a more forceful but a similar
kind of reclamation obviously of the term girl for feminist uses,
and so this article was sort of charting how riot
girl might have been evolving a little bit, perhaps as
(20:35):
these riot girls like Alison Wolf were aging into ladies.
So the author sites things like Lady Fest, which was
the Riot Girl reunion gathering in Olympia, Washington in two
thousand and then you have a riot girl ish band
Slater Kenny in instance, with ballot of a Lady Man
(20:55):
and talking about that queering of the term lady. You
also have Mr Lady which is a lesbian run record label.
It's tossed around in all sorts of communities. Now it's
obviously not just a rich white woman sort of tea
party word. Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting that
this is also happening amid uh discussions of fimphobia. You know,
(21:17):
we we've talked about fimphobia on the podcast before. And
for for women like the Riot Girls girls to reclaim
girl and make it their own, for for women to
call themselves ladies and reclaim that as a word of strength,
as a multicultural word of strength, not just reserve for
upper class, elite white ladies. Uh. You know, I think
(21:38):
that's also reclaiming uh maybe gender, reclaiming being a woman
and not being afraid of things that are female and feminine. Yeah,
and really quickly, I do want to clarify that what
I just said a white tea party word. I was
referring to like tea parties with tea and not the
political party, So not to confuse any listeners, um, but
(22:01):
I was surprised to read this quote from a book
written by Jennifer baumb Gartner and Amy Richards called Manifesto
Young Women Feminism in the Future that came out in
two thousand, because again, this is preceding the whole lady
blog thing, and they're already at that point talking about
how lady is quote a casual alternative term for a
(22:23):
woman or women, not only those who adhere to pressy,
white glove, upper krusty stereotypes. Yeah. I think back to
one of my earliest uses of the word lady, uh,
and clearly I must have had some ideas about what
it meant, even as a three year old. I was
on a trip with my parents, you know, and I
(22:45):
we stop at a grocery store to pick up some food,
and my dad and I are waiting in the car
for my mom to come out, and my dad looks
over and says, who's that lady? And I stand up
in the backseat and I say, that's no lady, that's
my mommy. Oh really, that story doesn't tie into much
of anything, but I was like there was a distinction, Yeah,
(23:07):
and my little three year old brain, I was like, no,
that is someone familiar and warm and loving, not a lady.
Not a lady. But the question now, though, is whether
or not lady has been fully reclaimed, because we still
have a lot of women who are not okay with
its use at all. And then there's still a lot
(23:27):
of women and also guys who use a lady in
the sense of prescribing women submissive roles, especially when we're
talking to little girls about being lady like. Oh yeah,
I mean, go back and listen to our our cursing podcast,
Women and Cursing. I mean that whole thing sprang out
of me over hearing a conversation where a woman was
(23:49):
talking about how cursing is not lady like. And not
to sound like I'm obsessed with Pinterest or something, but
I just pinned this thing the other day for our
stuff Mom never told you account and it was you
know those like inspirational messages that are pinned and they
travel very far and wide. Well, there was one about
(24:09):
how to be a lady. And I thought that it
would be ironic or funny or whatever. Oh no, it was.
It was legit, like wear high heels and R s
v P and and all of these weird things. And
I just thought, I just I literally recoiled and found
it gross. Oh absolutely, there was some. I mean, you
can easily google how to be a Lady, and there
(24:31):
are approximately one point five ba jillion, Yeah, how to posts? Well,
can we not? Here's what I would love? Can we
not separate these things? How about instead of saying, Kristen,
I really think you need to be better at being
a lady, and have that be so loaded and mean
that you need to like shape up or something. Can't
(24:53):
we just ask people to be polite or like, can't
we use different terms for this? Well, we can, but
I mean the fact that we haven't fully reclaimed It's okay, Well,
it's interesting that lady has been reclaimed in this more
ironic in groups sense, among particularly women of our generation
(25:15):
who self identify as feminists, because I would pose it
that women who talk about lady like and really adhere
to things like that pin of how to be a
lady and put on their pearls and high heels. Nothing
against pearls and high heels, own both of them, but
they probably would not self identify as feminists because we're
(25:39):
still living in a society where bossy is a bad
word for women, where lady can mean so many different things,
and we are not all on the same page about
what a woman should look like an act like yeah,
I'm gonna should go burn my soapbox. Excuse me, but
I will say that if you are ever wondering what
(26:01):
to call a female in front of you, particularly if
she is an adult or a group of adult females,
lady is so much better than girl. Yeah, oh absolutely,
And you know, just remember the context you're in. When
Kristen and I were looking up stuff to talk about
in this episode, I came across so many like etiquette
(26:24):
advice columns where men were honestly saying, I'm I'm afraid
I'm going to offend someone no matter what I say.
What should I call the women I work with? And
it's like, really, I mean, just just you use your sense.
Think about it. It's it's weird probably to start an
email to your colleague saying hey girls or hey women,
(26:46):
Both of those sound pretty pretty strange. You could just
say good morning. Yeah, we there's the you know, the
old standby of first names, but that gets clunky at me.
But that's also where the fact that we have the
word guys, it's so much easier. That's why I also
sometimes referred to groups of women as guys. You know,
(27:07):
it's almost becoming interchangeable because there isn't a convenient and
unloaded in between word for women, which is quite curious
if you think about it, and why is that? But
one quick question though, before we wrap up, Caroline, is
lady better than ma'am? Oh? Well, I mean I guess
(27:28):
that depends on who you refer to. Okay, if how
do you feel about guys in particular referring to women
as ma'am? Because from I think it's I think it's
a lot older. Yeah, I feel like with that when
you get into though, the tricky age. Yeah, I know.
My mother isn't a fan of it, which is interesting,
(27:52):
But then again she also prefers to call herself and
her friends girls. Yeah, yeah, I mean I think for
the again for the in group thing referring too, I
refer to girlfriends of mine as girls or girl, Hey girl,
hey lady. Well, now we want to hear from ladies listening,
and gentlemen, gentlemen, we also want to hear from you,
(28:12):
that's right? Yeah, what do you? What do you call yourself?
Your mother? Your girlfriends? Yeah? And how what do we?
Where do we go from here? Too? Though, Caroline, because
in a way, lady has been reclaimed for feminist purposes,
but there is still so much of that old guard
all that loaf needing and eating still happening. So do
(28:35):
we just keep calling each other ladies and sort of
sticking it to the the lady man? I mean, I'm fine,
I'm fine with it. I'm fine with lady too. I
I I think it's it's totally fine, and I appreciate
the implied uh endearment, but I do. I think it
says a lot though about where we are at this
(28:59):
in between phase, perhaps even of feminism in general, of
moving on from maybe the more serious and and that
might rub some people the wrong way, but a little
more serious second wave women's lib era where there was
no there was so much progress that needed to be made,
there was no room for irony. And now I got
a little room for it. But we haven't come all
(29:22):
the way yet. Sure, so send us all your lady
lady thoughts. I didn't notice, I didn't say lady like thoughts.
All the stuff at Discovery dot com is where you
can send your letters, and hey, if you want to
see all of the sources we cited for this episode,
head on over to Stuff I've Never Told You dot
com and click on the podcast link on the homepage
(29:44):
and for with every new episode that we published, we
also include our episodes sources so that you can read
more about each topic. And we have a couple of
letters to share with you right now and fitting. Both
of our letters are in response for episode on women
and cursing. So first up, I've got one here from Kim,
(30:07):
who writes Greetings, I recently started listening to your podcast
and I'm already a big fan. Well, thank you, Kim,
and welcome to the podcast. She writes, Your podcast on
swearing made me think of my coworker, who was trying
to cut back on cursing. Her four year old has
been repeating certain embarrassing phrases in public. We work at
an interior design firm specializing in corporate office space, and
(30:28):
part of our job has us on site and on
the phone with contractors. Since interior design is a field
primarily populated by women and construction as a field dominated
by men, I think my coworker uses curse words to
blend in with our contractors. Curse words have probably been
part of her vocabulary for a long time, but my
hypothesis is that she curses so contractors take her more seriously,
(30:50):
and after seeing her in action. I think that it's effective,
So thanks for that workplace observation, Kim So. I have
a letter here from Don who said that after listening
to the Curse of Swearing Women episode, she rushed home
to ask her British Icelandic husband if he thinks that
the turn off when she swears. She says, obviously, if
(31:13):
I am cursing at him, that's another story. But he
really thought it was a strange question. He grew up
in a rough part of England and Newcastle and his
father literally curses like a sailor because he was one.
My non American husband sees no big deal in women cursing.
Is that because he is not from puritanical sensor to America?
I think so my feeling about swearing in the workplace
(31:33):
maybe a bit prudish. Though I do not curse and
don't like others to curse because I find it unprofessional,
regardless of gender. I am a teacher, so that brings
a different set of expectations to the table. But many
of the military parents I meet with bring their four
letter words to school. As long as it's not directed
at me, I cope, but I am not comfortable swearing
at work. Because I have a professional persona that I
(31:54):
like to maintain once I leave work. That's another story.
I love swearing in expletives and get a kick out
of my kids using taboo words because they always use
them correctly. Like the quote unquote adult words you mentioned
that some parents used to label this category of words.
We use the term bathroom words for things our youngsters
need to say out of public range. They literally are
(32:15):
only permitted to use certain words in the bathroom. It
works well for our boy and our girl, and the
bathroom words include things like stupid and shut up and
what the and other derogatory terms more than so called
bad words. My son grew up with this model and
easily transitioned into understanding that some people did not like
to hear certain words. So now that he is nine,
(32:37):
he knows to check his audience. He knows it is
fine to use four letter words and such with my
husband and me, but not when Grandma is visiting. He
knows to change his language in tone when talking to
friends versus teachers. I am confident that as our four
year old daughter gets older, she too will figure out
these nuances. In the meantime, she has been known to
curse like a sailor, and my non American husband and
(32:57):
I are fine with that, so thank you very much. Done.
Maybe I'll start to use bathroom words to just in
the bathroom. Well, thanks everybody who's written in to us.
Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can
email us. You can also tweet us at mom Stuff
podcast or send us a message over on Facebook as well.
And Hey, for everything stuff Mom Never Told You related,
(33:18):
including all of our podcast, blogs, videos, and links to
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That's Stuff Mom Never Told You dot com For more
on this and thousands of other topics, Does it How
stuff Works dot com
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you. From how supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, or should I say hey ladies, Welcome
to the podcast. Hey ladies, ladies. We are going to
talk about ladies, ladies, ladies today as we well, we
(00:26):
always talk about ladies. We always talk about ladies, but
today we're actually talking about calling you ladies. And if
if that's okay, is that okay? I hope it's okay,
because hey, ladies, is what our sminty tote bags say. So, uh,
you know, if if we can't, then I'm going to
have to. We're gonna have to make some holes in
(00:47):
some tote bags, I know. And then it won't tote anything.
We'll only tote very small things or one large thing.
They won't slip through exactly. But anyway, but anyway, this
topic came from a listener letter, which once we read it,
we were like, oh my god, this is a great
topic of conversation. Why haven't we talked about this before.
(01:08):
It was a listener writing in saying that she finds
herself calling referring to herself and to her friends who
are girls or girlfriends as ladies, and how she knows
that her second wave feminist mother would be horrified by
the thought. She's saying that growing up in her household,
(01:29):
lady and especially lady like were bad words, Oh for sure.
And I and I totally get that the whole, the
whole explanation around that kind of generational difference. I know,
my mother, who was part of No Wave, uh, calls
herself a girl, calls her friends girls. I mean, she's
(01:50):
in her you know, she's in her mid sixties. But
what about lady lady? No, I do definitely use the
term lady. I think of it as a term of endearment,
and I totally get that it probably has ironic roots
among our generation. But yeah, I totally use the word lady.
It's kind of a term of endearment. Yeah. And there's
been a lot of talk of this resurgence of lady
(02:11):
and ladies, particularly among our generation of women. You have
Lady Gaga, for instance, two thousand and eight, the Beyonce
single All the Single Ladies, which will now be stuck
in my head for the rest of the day. Then
there's more recently the Book of Jezebel, which is subtitled
the Encyclopedia of Lady Things, and over at the New
(02:34):
Republic there is the journalist and freedman who posits that
lady the word lady, the term is kind of serving
the purpose of filling that limbo space between girlhood and womanhood.
Maybe it's a softer term. It's more all encompassing for
(02:54):
our generation, and it fits well with the Britney Spears
two thousand two songs, Uh not a girl, not yet
a woman? Well yeah? And also think about for guys,
they have guys. You don't have to say, choose between
calling a group of adult males boys or men, or
boys to men. But whereas with adult women in particular,
(03:17):
you have the more formal women. And it does feel
formal to say hello women, yeah, even though that's proper.
But at the same time, girls can be infantilizing, particularly
if it's not a girlfriend you're talking to, right, And
I do have to make a conscious effort to try
to stay away from saying girls, or I was hanging
(03:39):
out with this girl, or oh I know this girl.
It's just it's second nature. It just comes out of
my mouth like that. And I and I absolutely recognized
that I should get away from that, and so in
a way, lady helps out. It's sort of the the
female analog to guy. But let's go back in time.
Let's unload this very old and loaded term that is lady,
(04:04):
because we'll lead up to why people of say, our
our listeners mother's generation, who went through the women's literation
movement might not take so kindly to ladies. Right. I
love I love etymology in general, but I love the
origins of the word lady. Okay, So it emerges around
(04:26):
the year twelve hundred from the old English term meaning quote,
mistress of a household, wife of a lord. Okay, that
makes sense, right, But it's literally taken from the word
for a woman who needs bread, also loaf eater. And
of course I immediately saw that were like woman who
(04:47):
needs requires bread because she likes the tasty snack, not
needing as in massaging the dough with your hands. When
I told dude roommate about that, he was like, oh,
who needs it like loves bread And I was no
pushing it around with your hand. All the side note
on how delicious bread is and women's shoes with bread
these days, Oh lord, I know with my thyroid stuff
(05:09):
that I'm trying to cut back on gluten and it
is a tragedy. Yeah, maybe that's another episode bread ladies
and bread and ladies and Christans. Um. Yeah, I I
really love that image of women historically just hanging around
massaging balls of dough. Uh. But then once you get
into the early fourteenth century, there's a chivalry twist on it,
(05:34):
so you have lady implying a woman as an object
of chivalrous love. And the fifteen eighties that's when we
see the term lady like emerge. So we can we
can pin a lot of bad things to the fifteen eighties. Uh.
In seventeen eighty four the term ladies man emerges, Hello
(05:56):
the old ladies man. And then by the late eighteen hundreds,
lady has been commonly adopted as a term of address
for a woman, and its specifically though suggests quote a
woman whose manners and sensibilities befit her for high rank
in society. So there's a lot tied up with lady
in terms of class, social rank, and even implied among
(06:20):
that talking about race as well, right and background. This
time in Ladies Home Journal looks into this issue and
decrees that woman meant merely an adult female of the
human race, Lady meant someone wellborn and consequently well bred.
In other words, lady grew to mean a woman plus education, refinement, dignity,
(06:41):
and culture. And so from that people who might think, well,
what's wrong with lady? What wouldn't what woman wouldn't want
to be considered an educated, refined, culturally astute woman lady, Well,
probably women who don't want to be pigeonholed and forced
to act in a certain way. Yeah, because that's the thing.
(07:02):
If you think about agency in lady and how that's
constructed being lady, like I imagine a woman sitting with
her hands in her lap and her ankles crossed. Whereas
if you look, for instance, at lord, the you know,
the male analog to lady, it's very active. It literally
means going back to the dough kneading and all these
(07:25):
bread bread words. It literally comes from a word meeting
one who guards the loaves. So the lords are doing
the loaf guarding and the ladies are doing the loaf
needing and eating. I love it. Yeah, but yeah, so
so you can see right there that there is an
(07:45):
active role in a more passive submissive role tied up
in this whole lady business. Um and Elizabeth read Boyd
in her book Lady Still a feminist four letter word
highlights the double bind basically of being put up on
a pedestal and yet still expected to be that submissive character. Yeah.
(08:06):
Linguists Robin Lakeoff, who we said it before in the podcast,
wrote a paper all about this in nineteen five called
Language and Women's Place, and it comes up a lot
this paper does in this conversation around women in more
of a feminist context, because Lakeoff writes, quote, if she
refuses to talk like a lady, she's ridiculed and subjected
(08:27):
to criticism as unfeminine. If she does learn, she is
ridiculed as unable to think clearly, unable to take part
in the serious discussions in some sense, as fully less
than human, right exactly. And she also points out that
the word lady is tied into job titles that uh,
you know, traditionally are more blue collar. Uh, and this,
(08:51):
she says, underscores their low status things like cleaning ladies,
garbage ladies, lunch ladies, et cetera. And she says, hey,
there is no there's no equivalent for men. You don't
have a garbage gentleman. Right, you just have a garbageman, garbageman,
John Garbageman, John Garbageman, or a salesman. So this is
one of the main reasons that this more recent reclamation
(09:13):
of lady by millennials. And we'll talk to this this
actually isn't as new as we might think, um, but
this reclamation of lady is upsetting to second waivers, some
second waivers at least like Robin Lakeoff, because in the
pursuit of women's rights and gender equality in the nineteen
(09:34):
six season seventies, part of that was actively striving to
get rid of the term lady. They did not want
to be referred to as ladies because of all of
those passive connotations, right. And Lakeoff was quoted in stories
about this recently, and you know, they were like, well,
you wrote all this stuff about language about women. You know,
(09:55):
what do you think about this this upsurge in calling
women ladies or women calling each other that? And she said,
I you know, its alarm bells go off. It's it's
something that in my generation we always considered considered it
a problem. We had to overcome it, we had to
get rid of that word. And now our daughters and
granddaughters are throwing it around basically, right. She was basically saying,
if you have been around forty years ago and walked
(10:17):
in our shoes and bell bottoms, you'd get what we're
talking about. Gloria Steinham also has been quoted as talking
about how she has a fear of quote unquote looking
lady like. It's like one of one of the worst
possible things Um and then interviewing feminist writer Catha Polite
for her new Republic Peace and Freedman, quotes are saying
(10:39):
that ladies like lady parts, lady, business, lady writer, etcetera.
Started out as quite humorous and ironic, but overuse has
made it cliched and affected. I don't know, do you agree.
I mean, I think it's definitely everywhere, But I mean
Catha Polite is another person of like Robin lake offf
and Lord Asygnum's generation who has been around to see
(11:03):
this evolution of lady from being a mantle that they
cast off actively to being one that you and I
now casually adopt. Right, But I'm wondering, like I wonder
if we can think of this in a parallel way
to remember when we did our episode on up speak,
you know, and how both men and women of kind
(11:26):
of all ages, but really of kind of older generations
look at that as a an immature way of young
women and younger generations speaking, even though it's not really
confined to just young women. I wonder if it's being
dismissed as affected or clich because younger women have embraced
the use of the word lady, right, because I can
(11:48):
understand how using lady and up speak all the time
can seem like maybe it's undercutting yourself. There you go,
You see what I'm saying. But I do think there
are still some holdovers, lady holdovers that could be considered
problematic still today, for instance, there was a column in
USA Today by Christine Brennan talking about how we need
(12:11):
to retire lady from sports team names. So, for instance,
the University of Tennessee has the Lady Balls, or you
have the LPGA Tour. I mean, these aren't ladies out
on the basketball court. And yeah, they're not still wearing
their woolen skirts that fall to the fall to their shoes.
You know. These are these are athletes. These are women
(12:32):
who could snap me in half and beat me up
if they wanted to, like these these people are are
accomplished athletes. Yeah. Well, and so that's the case where
it's that more formalized use of lady that that seems
like something that's okay to get mad about. You know,
as far if we're talking about the you know, using
the term lady and when and how to use it,
(12:54):
it seems almost dismissive. And you know, like that you're
patting me on the head for being a tennis player
or a golfer. Um. You know, I want to be
if I'm a professional freaking athlete, I want you to
call me a woman. I'm a woman. It almost seems
like labeling me like a ladies tennis player. That's I'm
I'm just going to eat cucumber sandwiches all day. Well,
it's the whole thing too. If you're a professional athlete,
(13:14):
you probably just want to be called an athlete or
a tennis player rather than a lady whatever or a
woman whatever. And there's this blog called female Science professor Um.
She talked to a bunch of her students about this
topic and it really her blog past really highlighted the
generational divide I think in this argument because a lot
(13:36):
of the women in her classes, the ladies in her
classes in their twenties and thirties, women who are smart, accomplished, savvy,
all of that great stuff, they still call themselves girls.
They call their friends girls. And not only that, but
they think of their male peers as guys or the boys,
you know. And these are women who are smart, you know,
these are are women that she came to to be like, Okay,
(13:57):
what what do you think? You know, I trust you
to be smart women and give me a smart answer,
and they're like, yeah, you know, we really don't think
of it like that. Whereas the blogger, the female science
professor um said, I must be in an in between
generation then, because my my grandmother and my my older
aunt they call themselves the girls, they call their friends
(14:19):
the girls, Whereas I UM am of this generation where
you know, that's just not what you do. Yeah, I mean,
And you could look at that too in the context
kind of like with athletics, where stem is another area,
as we've talked about so many times now on the podcast,
where even today it's often more male dominated, and so
(14:40):
especially in environments like that, there's usually been historically more
of a persistent struggle to shirk off those female specific identifiers. Sure, yeah,
and she points out that, and some of her commenters
also point out that one of the problems is not
so much women calling each other girls or ladies, but
(15:02):
when you have male faculty who are calling their female
students the girls, and their male students men or young
men things like that. Yeah, I mean, I feel like
girls is almost a whole another conversation because I have
no problem usually with men, even if I don't know them,
and even in professional context, referring to women as ladies.
(15:27):
But if I don't know you, and especially in a
professional context, if you call me a girl, I will
not be happy about that and I might say something
to you about that. Um So, just a little side note.
So in our conversation up to this point, we've been
talking about this reclamation of lady is kind of a
given fact as something that has already happened, And going
(15:50):
into this episode research, I assumed that the whole lady
fest going on was a more recent product, maybe um
perpetuated by the lady blogs like Jezebel, the Gloss, the Hairpin, etcetera.
But it's actually been happening for a lot longer. So
(16:10):
we're gonna get into that reclamation of lady, how it
happened and who really started it when we come right
back from a quick break and now back to the show.
So we've given you the history of where lady, the
term lady comes from, why people are totally in the
right to be upset about the use of the word
because it indicates a whole lot of baggage. It's kind
(16:32):
of a loaded word. It's very loaded, very loaded. But
let's let's move forward into the eighties when the term
lady first started to be reclaimed. Yeah, this was something
that I found over at Idiot magazine and it talks
about how in nineteen nine, Queen Latifa's single Ladies First
(16:54):
was an early and significant reclamation of the word, and
particularly considering it's racial implications, because one thing that we
haven't really touched on in our conversation about lady up
to this point is how Yeah, there's obviously a lot
of class tied into it, but there's also this racial
component where a lot of times historically ladies would be wealthy,
(17:17):
upper class white women. Right. Yeah, if you think I
know that I have that stereotype when I think of
the word lady, not in terms of a term of
endearment for my friends, but I tend to think of
like a Victorian white lady with her hair in a bun. Yeah.
And Juliana Escobado Shepherd, writing over about this in Rookie Magazine,
(17:37):
says that it as in the use of lady in
Queen Lativa's Ladies First, democratize the use of the term
for Black women and also queered the meaning of lady
through lyrics and dance that confronted and defied rather than
charmed and seduced. And I do want to say a
side note, if you need a little feminist pump up,
just don't only listen to Ladies First, but watch a
(18:00):
video because it is nine fantastic. Uh So that's that's all,
just just my music minute. So in a way, Queen
Latifa's Ladies First was almost a dual reclamation because I mean,
if you if you go back into the racist history
of how white society conceptualized black women, particularly in like
(18:23):
Reconstruction America, as not ladies at all. I mean, you
have the hyper sexualization of black men and also the
hyper sexualization of of black women as well. So, um,
Elizabeth Boyd writing in Lady is It's still a four
letter word? She talks about how the term black lady
has been deeply embedded in the cultural imagination as the
(18:45):
moral icon of the race, embodying and upholding African American respectability.
So the term lady has been quite significant in the
African American community. And so then in nine when you
have Queen Latifa kind of flipping and reversing it to
borrow Missy Elliott, Uh, it was it was pretty significant because,
(19:06):
I mean, think about it when she talks about how
they are ladies who will kick it and with a
rhyme that is wicked. I mean they're like playing with
it so much and using lady not just as this primoralizer,
but someone who is active and you know, like Shepherd
says in Rookie, defying norms and standards rather than following norms. Yeah,
(19:29):
lady can be a source of strength. You can be
a lady and be strong. That that is the new meaning.
I would think, yeah, absolutely, and and certainly Alison Wolf
would agree. She is a riot girl. We've talked about
the riot girl movement on the podcast before and lead
singer of rat Mobile, and she talks about how in
her women's studies class during her freshman year of college
(19:51):
she would always use the terms girl or lady in
reference to women, and she says, I can't tell you
how often I was corrected in class by other female else.
Finally I just stood up and said, Hey, I'm in
my teens and girl is what I choose to call myself.
Isn't this about self representation? Yeah? This was out of
an article in Bitch magazine from the early two thousand's
(20:12):
about the reclamation of lady but more tying it to
riot girl because the girl with three RS and riot
girl is it was a more forceful but a similar
kind of reclamation obviously of the term girl for feminist uses,
and so this article was sort of charting how riot
girl might have been evolving a little bit, perhaps as
(20:35):
these riot girls like Alison Wolf were aging into ladies.
So the author sites things like Lady Fest, which was
the Riot Girl reunion gathering in Olympia, Washington in two
thousand and then you have a riot girl ish band
Slater Kenny in instance, with ballot of a Lady Man
(20:55):
and talking about that queering of the term lady. You
also have Mr Lady which is a lesbian run record label.
It's tossed around in all sorts of communities. Now it's
obviously not just a rich white woman sort of tea
party word. Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting that
this is also happening amid uh discussions of fimphobia. You know,
(21:17):
we we've talked about fimphobia on the podcast before. And
for for women like the Riot Girls girls to reclaim
girl and make it their own, for for women to
call themselves ladies and reclaim that as a word of strength,
as a multicultural word of strength, not just reserve for
upper class, elite white ladies. Uh. You know, I think
(21:38):
that's also reclaiming uh maybe gender, reclaiming being a woman
and not being afraid of things that are female and feminine. Yeah,
and really quickly, I do want to clarify that what
I just said a white tea party word. I was
referring to like tea parties with tea and not the
political party, So not to confuse any listeners, um, but
(22:01):
I was surprised to read this quote from a book
written by Jennifer baumb Gartner and Amy Richards called Manifesto
Young Women Feminism in the Future that came out in
two thousand, because again, this is preceding the whole lady
blog thing, and they're already at that point talking about
how lady is quote a casual alternative term for a
(22:23):
woman or women, not only those who adhere to pressy,
white glove, upper krusty stereotypes. Yeah. I think back to
one of my earliest uses of the word lady, uh,
and clearly I must have had some ideas about what
it meant, even as a three year old. I was
on a trip with my parents, you know, and I
(22:45):
we stop at a grocery store to pick up some food,
and my dad and I are waiting in the car
for my mom to come out, and my dad looks
over and says, who's that lady? And I stand up
in the backseat and I say, that's no lady, that's
my mommy. Oh really, that story doesn't tie into much
of anything, but I was like there was a distinction, Yeah,
(23:07):
and my little three year old brain, I was like, no,
that is someone familiar and warm and loving, not a lady.
Not a lady. But the question now, though, is whether
or not lady has been fully reclaimed, because we still
have a lot of women who are not okay with
its use at all. And then there's still a lot
(23:27):
of women and also guys who use a lady in
the sense of prescribing women submissive roles, especially when we're
talking to little girls about being lady like. Oh yeah,
I mean, go back and listen to our our cursing podcast,
Women and Cursing. I mean that whole thing sprang out
of me over hearing a conversation where a woman was
(23:49):
talking about how cursing is not lady like. And not
to sound like I'm obsessed with Pinterest or something, but
I just pinned this thing the other day for our
stuff Mom never told you account and it was you
know those like inspirational messages that are pinned and they
travel very far and wide. Well, there was one about
(24:09):
how to be a lady. And I thought that it
would be ironic or funny or whatever. Oh no, it was.
It was legit, like wear high heels and R s
v P and and all of these weird things. And
I just thought, I just I literally recoiled and found
it gross. Oh absolutely, there was some. I mean, you
can easily google how to be a Lady, and there
(24:31):
are approximately one point five ba jillion, Yeah, how to posts? Well,
can we not? Here's what I would love? Can we
not separate these things? How about instead of saying, Kristen,
I really think you need to be better at being
a lady, and have that be so loaded and mean
that you need to like shape up or something. Can't
(24:53):
we just ask people to be polite or like, can't
we use different terms for this? Well, we can, but
I mean the fact that we haven't fully reclaimed It's okay, Well,
it's interesting that lady has been reclaimed in this more
ironic in groups sense, among particularly women of our generation
(25:15):
who self identify as feminists, because I would pose it
that women who talk about lady like and really adhere
to things like that pin of how to be a
lady and put on their pearls and high heels. Nothing
against pearls and high heels, own both of them, but
they probably would not self identify as feminists because we're
(25:39):
still living in a society where bossy is a bad
word for women, where lady can mean so many different things,
and we are not all on the same page about
what a woman should look like an act like yeah,
I'm gonna should go burn my soapbox. Excuse me, but
I will say that if you are ever wondering what
(26:01):
to call a female in front of you, particularly if
she is an adult or a group of adult females,
lady is so much better than girl. Yeah, oh absolutely,
And you know, just remember the context you're in. When
Kristen and I were looking up stuff to talk about
in this episode, I came across so many like etiquette
(26:24):
advice columns where men were honestly saying, I'm I'm afraid
I'm going to offend someone no matter what I say.
What should I call the women I work with? And
it's like, really, I mean, just just you use your sense.
Think about it. It's it's weird probably to start an
email to your colleague saying hey girls or hey women,
(26:46):
Both of those sound pretty pretty strange. You could just
say good morning. Yeah, we there's the you know, the
old standby of first names, but that gets clunky at me.
But that's also where the fact that we have the
word guys, it's so much easier. That's why I also
sometimes referred to groups of women as guys. You know,
(27:07):
it's almost becoming interchangeable because there isn't a convenient and
unloaded in between word for women, which is quite curious
if you think about it, and why is that? But
one quick question though, before we wrap up, Caroline, is
lady better than ma'am? Oh? Well, I mean I guess
(27:28):
that depends on who you refer to. Okay, if how
do you feel about guys in particular referring to women
as ma'am? Because from I think it's I think it's
a lot older. Yeah, I feel like with that when
you get into though, the tricky age. Yeah, I know.
My mother isn't a fan of it, which is interesting,
(27:52):
But then again she also prefers to call herself and
her friends girls. Yeah, yeah, I mean I think for
the again for the in group thing referring too, I
refer to girlfriends of mine as girls or girl, Hey girl,
hey lady. Well, now we want to hear from ladies listening,
and gentlemen, gentlemen, we also want to hear from you,
(28:12):
that's right? Yeah, what do you? What do you call yourself?
Your mother? Your girlfriends? Yeah? And how what do we?
Where do we go from here? Too? Though, Caroline, because
in a way, lady has been reclaimed for feminist purposes,
but there is still so much of that old guard
all that loaf needing and eating still happening. So do
(28:35):
we just keep calling each other ladies and sort of
sticking it to the the lady man? I mean, I'm fine,
I'm fine with it. I'm fine with lady too. I
I I think it's it's totally fine, and I appreciate
the implied uh endearment, but I do. I think it
says a lot though about where we are at this
(28:59):
in between phase, perhaps even of feminism in general, of
moving on from maybe the more serious and and that
might rub some people the wrong way, but a little
more serious second wave women's lib era where there was
no there was so much progress that needed to be made,
there was no room for irony. And now I got
a little room for it. But we haven't come all
(29:22):
the way yet. Sure, so send us all your lady
lady thoughts. I didn't notice, I didn't say lady like thoughts.
All the stuff at Discovery dot com is where you
can send your letters, and hey, if you want to
see all of the sources we cited for this episode,
head on over to Stuff I've Never Told You dot
com and click on the podcast link on the homepage
(29:44):
and for with every new episode that we published, we
also include our episodes sources so that you can read
more about each topic. And we have a couple of
letters to share with you right now and fitting. Both
of our letters are in response for episode on women
and cursing. So first up, I've got one here from Kim,
(30:07):
who writes Greetings, I recently started listening to your podcast
and I'm already a big fan. Well, thank you, Kim,
and welcome to the podcast. She writes, Your podcast on
swearing made me think of my coworker, who was trying
to cut back on cursing. Her four year old has
been repeating certain embarrassing phrases in public. We work at
an interior design firm specializing in corporate office space, and
(30:28):
part of our job has us on site and on
the phone with contractors. Since interior design is a field
primarily populated by women and construction as a field dominated
by men, I think my coworker uses curse words to
blend in with our contractors. Curse words have probably been
part of her vocabulary for a long time, but my
hypothesis is that she curses so contractors take her more seriously,
(30:50):
and after seeing her in action. I think that it's effective,
So thanks for that workplace observation, Kim So. I have
a letter here from Don who said that after listening
to the Curse of Swearing Women episode, she rushed home
to ask her British Icelandic husband if he thinks that
the turn off when she swears. She says, obviously, if
(31:13):
I am cursing at him, that's another story. But he
really thought it was a strange question. He grew up
in a rough part of England and Newcastle and his
father literally curses like a sailor because he was one.
My non American husband sees no big deal in women cursing.
Is that because he is not from puritanical sensor to America?
I think so my feeling about swearing in the workplace
(31:33):
maybe a bit prudish. Though I do not curse and
don't like others to curse because I find it unprofessional,
regardless of gender. I am a teacher, so that brings
a different set of expectations to the table. But many
of the military parents I meet with bring their four
letter words to school. As long as it's not directed
at me, I cope, but I am not comfortable swearing
at work. Because I have a professional persona that I
(31:54):
like to maintain once I leave work. That's another story.
I love swearing in expletives and get a kick out
of my kids using taboo words because they always use
them correctly. Like the quote unquote adult words you mentioned
that some parents used to label this category of words.
We use the term bathroom words for things our youngsters
need to say out of public range. They literally are
(32:15):
only permitted to use certain words in the bathroom. It
works well for our boy and our girl, and the
bathroom words include things like stupid and shut up and
what the and other derogatory terms more than so called
bad words. My son grew up with this model and
easily transitioned into understanding that some people did not like
to hear certain words. So now that he is nine,
(32:37):
he knows to check his audience. He knows it is
fine to use four letter words and such with my
husband and me, but not when Grandma is visiting. He
knows to change his language in tone when talking to
friends versus teachers. I am confident that as our four
year old daughter gets older, she too will figure out
these nuances. In the meantime, she has been known to
curse like a sailor, and my non American husband and
(32:57):
I are fine with that, so thank you very much. Done.
Maybe I'll start to use bathroom words to just in
the bathroom. Well, thanks everybody who's written in to us.
Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can
email us. You can also tweet us at mom Stuff
podcast or send us a message over on Facebook as well.
And Hey, for everything stuff Mom Never Told You related,
(33:18):
including all of our podcast, blogs, videos, and links to
all of our social media presences, there's one place to go.
That's Stuff Mom Never Told You dot com For more
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