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Jan van Steenbergen scripsit:
> > > "Please Mr. Thalmann, I am an innocent young thing, and I am
> > > definitely not waiting to be abused by a male chauvinist pig like
> > > yourself! Behave, you naughty boy!", you might as well offer her
> > > your bed right away and take the couch for yourself.
> >
> > but *that* wording could only be a come-on, not a rejection, in
> > this our English tongue.
>
> Really? Why?
Well, I'm not much of a deconstructionist, but I'll try. "Naughty" in
Shakespeare's day meant "worthless" ("thou naughty knave"), but nowadays
the only relationship in which "naughty boy" can be said seriously, at
least in American English, is a mother addressing her son, and he has
to be pretty young at that. From any other female to male, it is either
affectionate (if the parties know each other fairly well) or flirtatious.
Saying "Mr. Thalmann" in a social circumstance has to be ironic as well:
if you know someone well enough for a social evening, first names are
mandatory, unless you are dating your boss in a fairly conservative
industry -- and even then he'll probably say "Call me Christian".
So it too is flirtatious.
The whole thing has a 19th-century tone: it sounds like something out
of _Gone With the Wind_, and I don't believe for a minute that any
American woman could say such a thing with a straight face -- unless
she were being flirtatious, in which case it is quite reasonable.
(Not a type that would appeal to me personally, other things being equal.)
--
"But the next day there came no dawn, John Cowan
and the Grey Company passed on into the jcowan@hidden.email
darkness of the Storm of Mordor and were http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
lost to mortal sight; but the Dead http://reutershealth.com
followed them. --"The Passing of the Grey Company"