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Actually, no, I wasn't saying that at all, but I guess I didn't explain myself very well.

The terms widow and widower are as you believe, Ann. A woman whose husband has died is a widow, a man whose wife has died is a widower. A widow is always female, a widower is always male. That's using those words as nouns. If you want to use widow as an adjective - e.g. the widowed Lois - you would also use the same word for Clark - the widowed Clark. Never the "widowered Clark". English is such a straight-forward language, don't you think?

But what I was getting at is that it seems that while the word "widow" is very commonplace, far fewer people will use the word widower - when talking about a man the sentence is often phrased differently so that the word widower is NOT used. So that it would be much more common for me to see a reference to Clark's widow, Lois than to see Lois' widower, Clark, even though both phrases are grammatically correct. I think this is a fair statement for North American usage of the words - I can't speak for other parts of the world.

Obviously that doesn't mean that there aren't widowers out there, but that they will generally not be referred to as such. Is that clearer?

I suppose this is a possible interpretation, but I personally think it's just that the word "widower" is not as commonly used. Maybe you won't feel that this helps prove my point, but I asked my son what a woman was called whose husband had died, and he immediately answered "widow". When I asked him the reverse, he thought for a moment and then answered "widower?" with some hesitation. Maybe he thought it was a trick question on my part , but he obviously did not feel as confident in his response as he had with my first question.

Kathy

All this surprised me - I would have expected that there wouldn't be much difference in google results for either terms. Kathy's son's reactions got me to thinking , though. Why did he react that way?

So could it be other factors as well as those that have been raised in the previous posts?

Historically woman tended to be known in their communities by their marital status - widow, wife of , spinster - whereas men tended to be known by their occupation.

Today that's less so (although not entirely ). But women have a life-span of about 7 years longer than men, so , simply put, there are more widows around.

As well, our culture is okay with men marrying younger but less so with women marrying younger - hence a widower is more likely to remarry than a widow.

probably totally off base with these observations.

c.

I'm going to try and keep this free from my own personal thoughts on the topic - very recently, I've watched a man mourn for his wife after 60-odd years of marriage. That anybody has the audacity to question this strikes me as ridiculous. Instead, I'm just going to throw this in for consideration:

Most women outlive their partners. In Australia, at least, the average age that men are expected to reach is 78.5 years. For females, it's 83.3 years. Also of particular interest in this discussion:

[Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics ]

I'm sure you'd find similar statistics in other western countries.

Maybe the reason you're finding more about grieving widows is that there simply are more of them.

Dave

Dave, you are absolutely right. More women are widowed than men. Certainly in the parts of the world that we describe as Western civilisation. I'm not so sure about the rest of the world. About twenty years ago I saw some life expectancy figures from Bangladesh, where men lived 1-2 years longer than women. And this summer New York Times published life expectancy figures from Zimbabwe, where men lived almost three years longer than women, although neither men nor women on average lived to be forty!

But in the western parts of the world, yes, there are certainly more widows than widowers. And that is undoubtedly part of the reason why our societies have given widows a certain role to play and certain codes of conduct to observe, whereas I don't think that this is generally the case for widowers. Admittedly the social mores are changing for women, too. But when I was a kid, I remember that you could see that a woman was widowed, because she would wear black. I particularly remember that she would wear black stockings. In extreme cases she would hang a small black veil from her hat to cover her face. She could be dressed like that for a long time, for months or even for years. But you could never spot a widower from his clothes, unless he wore a black mourning-band. (Yes, he would wear black during the funeral, of course, but afterwards he would dress "normally".)

I still think that our societies "expect a little more" from widows than from widowers, and that that fact might make it tempting to show Clark's grief if he was to become widowed. Because he would grieve out of the the true love and grief of his heart, not first and foremost because society expected it from him.

And Dave: the fact(?) that our societies may still expect a little more from widows than from widowers has nothing to do with how much the individual widow or widower will grieve. My grandfather was two years younger than his wife. When she died at 86, he was absolutely heartbroken. He lived ten more years without her, but he talked about her all the time, and he cried a lot.

Still, people who haven't watched the grief of a widower up close may be "subconsciously aware" of "the lesser expectations" placed on a widower compared with the expectation placed on a widow. It's fun to write and read about unusual things. What would you rather read about, "Dog Bit Man" or "Man Bit Dog"?

Ann

Carol, you said this:

Indeed our culture is okay with men marrying younger women, but less so with women marrying younger men! I assume that most members of these boards are aware of the fact that Dean Cain is a year or so younger than Teri Hatcher. In LnC fanfics, Clark Kent has been given Dean Cain's birthday (in February 1966, I think). But Lois Lane has not been given Teri Hatcher's birthday, because that would make Lois older than Clark Kent, and that would not be appropriate! (Would it?) I'm pretty sure I have seen that Lois Lane was supposedly born in 1967, so that she would be about a year younger than Clark Kent.

As the case of Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher's ages versus Clark Kent and Lois Lanes's ages show, most of us "know" very well what is appropriate when it comes to men and women.

Ann

This is incorrect. Clark's birthdate on the show was given as February 28 (in the episode Never on Sunday) and his ship landed in Smallville on May 17, 1966. Hence the conclusion that he was born on February 28, 1966. Lois' exact birthdate was never given but the episode Tempus, Anyone? established that she was born in 1967 and in the Pilot (set in 1993) she gives her age as twenty-six. She was a Libra so that means she was born between September 24 and October 23, 1967. So the ages of the characters are canon.

P.S. Dean Cain was born on July 31, 1966.

I stand corrected. Still, Dean Cain is younger than Teri Hatcher, but Clark Kent was made to be older than Lois Lane.

Ann