Thursday, April 13, 2006

Madame or mademoiselle?

I love hearing about France from the BBC. There's a piece on how a feminist group wants to ditch mademoiselle entirely, and just use madame. Somehow I don't see this happening. Anglophone feminists took a different approach -- don't subtract a form of address, add one -- and Ms. is incredibly successful, remarkably so considering it's a made-up word.

Me, I don't mind being called either one. And I get them both; I'm old enough to be called "madame", but I look young enough to be called "mademoiselle."

I still remember the first time I was called "ma'am," I was prolly about twenty.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What about "Hey You !!!" ? :)