A lady or a woman? - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange
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.
These seats are reserved for ladies. The old lady running the roadside lunch house brought him rice and curry. The new District Collector is a lady. Calling somebody a 'woman' is usually perceived as rude here, with the notable exceptions of news journalism, law, bureaucratese and scientific literature: Bangalore woman wins Maths Olympiad.
The plural possessive is "ladies'." "Lady" is singular, so if you were referring solely to one woman's shoes, it would be "the lady's shoes." As for your second question, I'm assuming you're referring to a group of women in your salutation of them, so it would be "Good morning, ladies." And as you're addressing them directly, the comma preceding "ladies" is necessary.
Idiomatically, it is gentleman. Lady comes from an Old English compound noun meaning roughly "loaf kneader," whereas lord comes from a compound noun meaning "loaf keeper" or "loaf protector." The etymological counterpart of gentleman, which is indeed gentlewoman, is used infrequently these days, usually in historical or quasi-historical contexts.
single word requests - Is there an opposite gender for "lady ...
Lady Macbeth wants to substitute her milk (which would nourish a kid) for gall, which today would mean boldness and impertinence, but also refers to bile (Merriam-Webster). So here, too, the milk is too kind, too nourishing, and so it must be switched for something more murderous so that she can physically and mentally go through with murder.