Yes, milady comes from my lady Did it originally appeared in english countries, or Milady (from my lady) is an english term of address to a noble woman
Meet Lady London: The Cutthroat Femcee With Surgeon-Sharp Precision
It is the female form of milord
And here's some background on milord
I have been wondering about this little problem for a while now Everyone understands that, in the binary, the opposite of 'man' is 'woman', and the opposite of 'gentleman' is, namely, 'gentlewoman'. I tried searching google ngram viewer for look lady and listen lady, both capitalized so as to occur at the start of a sentence, with the hope that these ngrams would reflect the usage of lady in a derogatory/dismissive sense It seems to have come into usage around 1950, and really took off in the late 1990s.
If you are wondering why we don't write ladies's, it is because ladies is one of the exceptions, along with girls', parents', players', weeks' and even klingons' it can get a bit niggly with names too Aristophanes' plays, but jesus's miracles and (usually) james. This seems rather a poor act of classification,. 11 how lady is going to be received really depends on your audience
That said, some options are
My good lady my lady my good woman madam woman a lot will depend on context, too, as well as tone. Even when lady macbeth says And take my milk for gall, that would definitely support the literal humorism theory, but i still don't understand how we get from milk to blood (too much of the blood humor supposedly being the problem). Otherwise, as elliot frisch has suggested, lady is the term you want
But in my opinion, if you're talking about clients of yours, be gender neutral Lady can have negative implications in this setting because it is often used in a negative fashion, e.g That lady wouldn't stop talking about. Where did the saying ladies first originate
