Marriage Quote by Russell Lynes

“Lady” arrives as a compliment but behaves like a trap: a word that pretends to be precise while doing the social work of a fog machine. Russell Lynes, a midcentury American critic with a keen eye for status theater, is teasing out how supposedly genteel language polices class and gender without ever admitting it’s doing so. The brilliance is in his mock-taxonomic tone. He treats “lady” like a species label, then quietly demonstrates it can’t survive contact with actual people.

The line “nothing very specific” punctures the word’s authority. “Lady” isn’t a neutral descriptor; it’s a credential, handed out by whoever holds the power to define respectability in a given room. Lynes’ escalating examples (“another man’s woman,” “another man’s wife”) expose how male perspective is baked into the term. The category shifts depending on who’s looking, which is exactly the point: “lady” is relational, not inherent. It’s a verdict, not an identity.

“Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide” is the killer closer, making the observation feel almost scientific while indicting the whole enterprise. Lynes is describing a culture addicted to soft words that do hard sorting. “Lady” can elevate, diminish, sexualize, de-sexualize, or domesticate, often in the same breath. The subtext is that respectability is less about behavior than about who gets to narrate it - and that the narration is rarely innocent.