— Strictly Speaking

I was recently in Brussels with my sister.  We were flipping around the cable, looking for something to entertain us as we waited for our uncle to stop by, and we came across a rerun of “Who’s the Boss” dubbed in French.  The show is weird enough and amusing enough in English (the hair! the clothes!) but somehow watching Tony Danza speak French adds a whole new level of absurdity.  We started talking about the title of the show.  Why is it a question?  It is very clear who the boss is, because the female is the employer and the male is the employee and there’s no doubt about this.  Nevertheless, the title of the show is still “Who’s the Boss”, presumably because it was assumed to be such an outlandish situation for the time that there still could be some confusion, at least culturally.  “This is crazy! How could a woman be the boss?!”  One hopes that today the male-is-the-default-head-of-the-household concept is at least as out of fashion as those shoulder pads…