Re: yet another "are you two brothers?" anecdote

On Sun, 6 Jul 2008 00:00:03 -0500, David Gartner wrote:

Usually, if one listens carefully, one can tell the sense in which
the word 'partner' is being used. ...

(apropos of little beyond a semantics discussion on the word
"partner")

During one of last night's episodes of "Ghostly Encounters," a guy --
who was being attacked during the night by an entity, but that's not
important here -- kept referring to his "partner" lying in bed beside
him. He consistently used the word "partner" in reference to the
person sharing his bed, so naturally I thought he'd lucked out that
evening and found a *HUNK* on the streets of Toronto.

If you get the Bio channel and have surfed past it early Sunday
evenings, you may have noticed that "Ghostly Encounters" is minimalist
television. An average Canadian citizen sits in front of a camera and
tells about his (or her) experiences in a haunted house, interspersed
with illustrative B&W film clips that are obviously low budget yet
highly effective at creating an ominous mood through effective use of
light and shadow.

So as this guy told his story, we kept seeing a shot of a minimally
furnished bedroom -- but the shot was too wide to discern any
distinguishing characteristics of the "partner" lying on the left side
of the bed. Given the track record of this show's casting director, I
was sure that when the camera zoomed in I'd glimpse the handsome face
of a young Canadian aspiring actor. "For this role, you just have to
lie there and look beautiful, hon."

Look beautiful is right -- when we finally got a close-up of the bed,
we saw that the guy's "partner" was a woman. Why did he consistently
refer to her as his "partner," then? Why didn't he refer to her as "my
girlfriend" -- "my main squeeze" -- "some dame"?
.

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