Talk:ladies and gentlemen

Why we usually use it as "ladies and gentlemen" but not "gentlemen & ladies"?


 * It is/was a politeness custom: ladies first, women and children first. See also: age before beauty. DCDuring TALK 14:32, 22 April 2012 (UTC)


 * I've [//www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2017/08/31/chips-and-fish-word-order-in-english-collocations/ read] speakers have a tendency to put short words before long words. There is also a tendency to put men before women, but usually only where men have as many syllables, or fewer ("men and women", "his and hers", "brothers or sisters"), and not even in all those cases ("mom and dad", "mom and pop", "aunts and uncles"). In the only example Cambridge gives of a 'higher-rank' rule causing long to precede short, "bacon and eggs", it looks like "eggs and becon" is still [//books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bacon+and+eggs%2Ceggs+and+bacon&year_start=1808&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbacon%20and%20eggs%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ceggs%20and%20bacon%3B%2Cc0 about half] as common. - -sche (discuss) 06:49, 20 April 2019 (UTC)