You have to keep in mind the difference between a newspaper reporting an event occurred and a newspaper reporting that somebody said an event occurred.
If it’s a server, I don’t care. If it’s an old man, I may be annoyed, but I’ll give him a pass for being old – my mother assured me that her generation preferred that form of address. If it were my 45 year old superior at work, I’d be pretty unhappy.
I was about to try to phrase something about how it would sound different coming from a little old lady – but I’m 71. And I’m 5’2". I am a little old lady, damn it, and I’m one of the people complaining about most uses of the word.
Fake news and outrage bait aren’t the same thing. Most outrage bait sticks with information that is true. The problem is the framing, the way information is presented and what information is left out.
It’s a one-sided story, written in a way that pushes a certain narrative. There’s a reason why the paper’s core audience responded the way it did in the comments.
These stories of “PC gone amok” always have more to them. If they make you angry, they can make it where you don’t notice the information that is lacking.
I’m trying not to get my undies in a bundle, at least until the school board itself says “We apologize…”
Or, more likely, they’d say “The candidate was pressuring us to accept his salary requirements, which were far beyond our budget. Therefore, we decided we couldn’t afford him. And by the way, contrary to his version of what happened, he never did address us as ‘ladies’.”
The article in the OP said the agreed-upon salary was $140,000 and to be honest, that doesn’t sound like an outrageous number. If anything, it sounds a bit low.
For what do you think he’s owed an apology?
Are you assuming everything he says is true?
Do you think job offers should only be withdrawn for certain reasons you think are acceptable?
I just remembered that I was offered a job in 1996 or so. The place where I was was not working out but it would have been a big salary cut so I countered and they said, “sorry, bye.”
Well, I’m positive that there were female-bodied people in previous generations who did not like being referred to as ladies.
And in the case of servers, I’ve had the pointed version directed at me more than once, where it came with a side of misogyny/homophobia/transphobia – I’m not sure how to characterize it, but it is tied to a sense that they are deliberately using a form of address that is unsuited to me.
The apology was IF it turned out he was telling the truth. I said that the “more likely” option was the opposite.
Here:
Thank you for that. I would bristle at “ladies”, and assume sexism on the part of the speaker (whether deserved or not).
That’s why I HATE women being called “gals”. My father ran a very sexist business* and when he referred to “the gals at work” as in “I’ll have the gals do that”, it was invariably a menial task that he would never ask “the guys” to do.
*“I really don’t like hiring young women. Before you know it, they get married, and then you’ve lost a worker.”
My dad, to his son!, 1970
[God, no wonder I’m screwed up…]
Ah, I misunderstood your second paragraph. I thought you were saying they would more likely hide behind the salary requirements.
But you are saying that if they disliked how he wrote the email greeting, and decided not to hire him after all, they would owe him an apology?
Well, I was thinking of the accusation of “micro-aggression”. But I do NOT think they ever said that… that was from HIS whining to the media.
Eh, I think job offers have been rescinded for much worse reasons. Or no reason at all.
If they were specifically looking to hire someone who understood microaggressions, and would be a leader around such issues, I could see them pulling the offer after that tone-deaf email greeting. But, I’m not the intended audience of this clickbait about wokeness run amok.
Yeah, I can’t remember the last time I was in a group in a professional setting that was publicly addressed as “Ladies and Gentlemen”, but I’m sure it was well over fifteen years ago.
Nowadays it’s usually something like “Greetings and welcome” in a verbal address, and “Dear colleagues” or similar in an email.
Meeting chairs at my quilting guild composed mostly of elderly women do sometimes greet us with “Hello, ladies”, and sometimes if they remember the lone male quilter present they’ll say “ladies and Tom”, and tee-hee a bit. This annoys me some, partly because it’s reminiscent of similar tee-heeing back in the days when I was often the only woman in a group of co-workers and got the “gentlemen and Kimstu” callout. But I let it go because it’s a social group and the elderly leaders of it are entitled to set the tone as they prefer.
I would speak up if I thought Tom found it annoying, though. And I notice that almost none of the various quilting-circuit speakers whom we pay to give instructional lectures ever address us as “ladies”. Being professionals, they realize that their bread and butter to some extent depends on not gratuitously pissing people off, so they follow more contemporary standards of public-speaking usage.*
And yes, the reason that “ladies” frequently comes across as condescending in a professional setting is that it was traditionally associated with a sort of background radiation of social gallantry that is inappropriate in the workplace. “Ladies first”, “The ladies, God bless them”, “There are ladies present”, “Ladies shouldn’t be bothered with business matters”, etc., all illustrate the kind of exaggerated performative deference that served to exclude women from contexts where serious work was being done. It’s a form of address that should be avoided by anybody trying to convey respect for professional women as equal participants in serious work.
* Can I just hijack this briefly to marvel at how WEIRDLY FLEXIBLY American quilting culture, at least in the Northeast, seems to straddle the cultural divide between conventional American “family values” patriotic/family/cutesy-ness piety and art-world cutting-edginess? I always check my t-shirt before leaving for a guild meeting to make sure I’m not wearing any slogans that might shock or distress any of the more traditional Christian flag-quilt-stitching grandmas, but then at the meeting the Christian flag-quilt-stitching grandmas are all hanging on the words of the lecturer who’s an ex-hippie industrial fabric designer telling us about how the Chicago drug scene and Op Art movement of the sixties influenced her early color palette, or an ostentatiously gay-as-a-kite sewing instructor explaining his ingenious new method of setting prairie points. Grandma shock-or-distress level: zero. Floors me every time.
I want to respond – or perhaps more accurately, raise a question – about this business of “ladies” and “ladies and gentlemen” that quite a few posters have brought up in this thread. I’m not particularly singling out the quotes below, they just happen to be a convenient way to organize my comments.
If it was more than two or three people, I would most likely use “ladies and gentlemen”, and if it was only men, then “gentlemen” is the customary term.
It’s not that it’s “necessary”, it’s that this is how our language and social custom currently works. I’m all for linguistic change when there’s a good reason for it, like gender-neutral pronouns instead of pervasively masculine ones, but not when faced with the double barriers that (a) the justification for avoiding gendered constructions seems rather flimsy, and (b) the proposed alternatives all sound – at least to me – to be clumsy and sometimes set an inappropriate tone.
All the alternatives to “ladies and gentlemen” and variations thereof that I’ve heard proposed so far seem to me to be in this category. Something like “hello, everyone” is distinctly informal and would be fine for opening a speech where that is the desired tone, but not for more formal ones and certainly not for written communication. “Greetings” is famously associated with draft notices. I am genuinely mystified by what would be deemed an appropriate form of address in written communication to a large general audience other than the traditional “ladies”, “gentlemen”, or “ladies and gentlemen” that doesn’t sound stilted or awkward.
Alternatives are easy when it’s a well-defined group, where you can say things like “dear fellow board members” or “dear valued employees” – although even there I can see nitpicking of the former about the use of the word “fellow”. It just gets ridiculous – “fellow” as an honorific has been used for years for men and women alike to designate a specially privileged research or administrative position, and there’s been no pearl-clutching over it that I’m aware of.
I’m not oblivious to the fact that “ladies” has sometimes been used in condescending ways, or perceived as such, but that has less to do with language than with condescending attitudes as old as misogyny itself. Maybe we should learn to stop being condescending instead of banning important words from the language. When we can’t even figure out how to politely address each other without someone somewhere perceiving it as offensive, language isn’t the problem.
I would address any such small group by the names of the individuals; first names if it’s informal and we know each other, last names otherwise.
Wow, you are 20 or more years out of date. I honestly can’t remember the last time i heard “ladies and gentlemen” in a business context. As i said, what I’ve heard is no honorific at all:
“Thank you for attending our seminar on…”
“Welcome to the quarterly actuarially forum…”
“Let’s wait another minute for stragglers…(first slide is presented and we wait a minute) Today I’m taking about…”
And i work in the insurance industry, which is not a bastion of social progressives.
(a) and (b) are both wrong. The justification for avoiding constructions like “Ladies” is that many women have expressed discomfort with it, and that’s all the justification a savvy person needs to avoid using the term during job negotiations. The proposed alternatives are multifarious, depending on the context; for example, in this case, he could have addressed them as “Members of the Board,” or by their names if he was talking to only two of them.
Why is an alternative needed? I cannot remember ever receiving a business communication that started out “Ladies and Gentlemen” .* If it was an in-person meeting it would possibly start with “Good morning, all” or else one of the alternatives puzzlegal gave. In writing - I wouldn’t get a letter addressed to multiple people. I often received memos addressed to multiple people , but the “To” section either contained each person’s name and title or a list of titles , never “Ladies and Gentleman”. Emails either had 1) no salutation 2) were written in memo format or 3) had an attachment written as a memo.
And I worked at an organization that old-fashioned enough that it was using “Messrs.” into the 80s and “cross out “Mr Soaandso” and handwrite his first name” into the 90s.
Greetings isn’t really associated with draft notices anymore - most working people are too young.
In fact, the only place i can remember hearing that is the circus. “Laaadies and gentlemen, children of all ages…” And there, i think it was intentionally archaic.
Right? This is something I’ve never heard of and I’m in my mid fifties.