Jenny wrote:
And the fact that he doesn't give her name, or even say "my wife"
or "my lover", but "my woman". Creepy.<<
I always assumed it to be the accepted expression in the Federation, as Shrinker uses it too when talking about Anna Grant to Avon ("I never saw your woman!")
Harriere wrote:
Not necessarily - I quite like those languages where "my man" and "my
husband" are expressed by the same words.<
That is the case in Dutch, likewise the word for "woman" also means "wife". That's probably why the use of it doesn't sound strange to me.
But in this case, I assume that they weren't married, and then you get into
the tired old what-do-you-call-them thing. I remember round about the time of B7 someone listing possible options in a letter to a newspaper, and rejecting "my lover" as unnecessarily dramatic - and Gan is rather understated. "My partner" might leave the audience wondering whether the trooper was sabotaging their small business. "My girlfriend" would just about do, but might imply the relationship was a little more casual than I imagine it to be. "My significant other" would sound absurdly comic. "My common-law wife" would be a bit technical.<
"My concubine" wouldn't have been suitable for the time-slot :-)
Marian