What does debutant mean?
First off, I must admit, I don't even know how to spell this word- debutant? debutante? deb-you-tont. I am going to go with debutante, it seems more formal even if it is wrong. Breaking news, my roomate just verified that it is indeed debutante.Okay here's the setting. I'm sitting at Starbucks today with a student and we were talking about his Thanksgiving break. He informed me that he traveled to Jackson, Mississippi because his girlfriend, a sophomore here at Vanderbilt, was being presented at a debutante ball. This whole concept is very new to me. I had heard the word a couple of times before moving to Nashville, but I guess when you grow up in small town Oklahoma, your pickings for presentees at a debutante ball are pretty slim. My fiance Sarah grew up in Louisiana and her family does the debutante thing and so I have recently heard more on the subject.
So here we are talking about what it means for a girl to be a debutante. It is a formal way of telling 'society'(which i hear is code for other wealthy people in the area) that this girl is making her debut as an eligible woman. Now as best as I can tell, this guy really likes his girlfriend and they seem to be a good match. I think pretty highly of them both and would be fairly confident that they could get married next summer and the marriage would last. When I suggested to him that he should marry her, he said 'No way man, she would flip out. Her parents too.' And then he just kind of laughed as if I had just spilled the punchline to some joke.
I'm confused, if a girl has been debuted to society as being eligible, and furthermore, if her father is the one who presents her! then why is it so taboo to suggest that the girl could be married? Things intensified when the girlfriend walked into Starbucks and I brought her into the conversation. She gave about the same response as he did, implying that I was crazy. Am I crazy? I think I'm just calling a spade a spade.
By the way, what does 'calling a spade a spade' mean? I think it means the same thing as 'calling it the way I see it.' Is that true?
posted by corbs @ 12:09 PM
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