I prefer a man who lives...

A very brief reference to the song "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" is in my NORMA JEANE play and so I've been thinking about the song lately. It's frightfully clever, and not just the immortal line: "it's then that those louses go back to their spouses" although that is still my favorite.

The actual message of the song is horribly whore-ish, but it's excusable for the time period since trading sex for a man's money was exactly the basis of heterosexual marriage in an age when women were expected to quit a job when they got married - and this assumption, to my amazement held sway into the mid 1970s as a rerun of an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show made clear to me.

But anyway, because I was always focused on "gives expensive jewels" in the opening lines of the song...

The French are pledged to die for love
They delight in fighting duels.
But I prefer a man who lives
And gives expensive jewels.

...I missed the humor in "I prefer a man who lives" - in other words did not die fighting a duel.