Madies and gebbamins
To self: Susan, take your hands off the keyboard! Do not answer the question! You will only receive a warning.
I prefer “You-uns”.
Either New Hampshire is weird, or the US South is weird. I have an uneasy feeling which you guys and, er, females will pick.
But I digress. Outside grocery store in NH, I stopped to let to lad…women enter before me, and politely smiled, as my Mother from Tennessee had taught me.
They turned and ran.
That’s saying that you shouldn’t address them at all. Just talk about them indirectly, instead of to them.
No it isn’t. “Good afternoon” isn’t talking about them (or for that matter about the afternoon); it’s a greeting, just as much as “ladies and gentlemen” is. Do you think that saying “goodbye” to somebody is talking about them?
And it’s a greeting which works for people of any gender.
From Tom Stoppard’s Travesties:
CARR: I took to drinking hock and seltzer for my nerves at a time when nerves were fashionable in good society. This season it is trenchfoot, but I drink it regardless because I feel much better after it.
TZARA: You might have felt much better anyway.
CARR: No, no—post hock, propter hock.
Mah Peeps!
I understood that reference.
“Uh, uh, post, after, after hoc, ergo, therefore, after hoc, therefore, something else hoc.”
ETA: Ninja’d.
“Ladies,” Perrone wrote in an email to school officials amid contract negotiations. “Good evening! I perused the contract and have three requests.” He went on to ask for annual salary increases, additional vacation days, and additional sick days. The requests amounted to 70 days, or 14 weeks, of paid time off for his first year on the job, and fewer in subsequent years.
How about this:
“Ladies,” Perrone wrote in an email to school officials amid contract negotiations.“Good evening! I perused the contract and have three requests.” He went on to ask for annual salary increases, additional vacation days, and additional sick days. The requests amounted to 70 days, or 14 weeks, of paid time off for his first year on the job, and fewer in subsequent years.
Easy peasey.
“Dear Members of the Selection Committee,”
“Dear Dr. X [if there’s a chair] and Members of the Selection Committee,”
“Dear Octavia Googolplex and Members of the Selection Committee,”
Not really. In this context the entire point of using that phrase is to avoid any direct reference to them. The point is to avoid personally addressing them and essentially talk to the air, as if you were recording a message to be played to persons unknown later.
I have absolutely no idea what you’re on about. If somebody told me they were offended by my using “good afternoon” as a salutation, either in person or via email, I’d be pretty sure they were fucking with me.
I disagree with that.
The point of using that phrase may be to include everybody, of whatever gender; or it may simply be the greeting phrase the speaker ordinarily uses. It certainly isn’t to avoid addressing the group, any more than not reciting all their individual names is to avoid addressing the members of the group.
How about the ghost of Jerry Lewis-- does he get a pass?
Or the ghost of Groucho Marx:
Ladies and gentlemen…I suppose that takes in most of you…
And if someone told me they were offended by “ladies”, I feel the same.
And, the point in this context of using “good afternoon” isn’t to offer a salutation, it’s to avoid directly referring to the women in question at all. Out of fear of causing offense, because apparently any term that refers to them is somehow “insulting”.
Depends significantly on the context.
In the context of this insistence that nobody could possibly address a group of women by starting off with “Good afternoon” unless they were trying to avoid referring to the women – in that specific context, I’m finding your insistence on referring to their gender to be disturbing.
I’m not offended by “ladies and gentlemen” to start off a relatively formal address; I’d just find it a bit old fashioned, and wonder if there were any nonbinaries in the audience. But somehow finding offense in “good afternoon”, as you seem determined to do, is another matter altogether.