Girls

Sir Roger Gale sounds like an old-bufferish knight of the shires, but he once worked as a disc-jockey on a pirate radio station. Last week he got into hot water when he said on the radio that his wife was ‘utterly dedicated to her job, as indeed are the other girls in my office’. Before he knew it, Today got some American academic on air to denounce him. ‘We know, looking in the dictionary,’ she said, ‘that girl means a young woman only up to the age of 11 or 12.’

This bossy woman should get a bigger dictionary to look in. There is plenty of evidence that girl has meant ‘woman’ for centuries. In its earliest history it signified ‘a young person’ of either sex. The Oxford English Dictionary avers that it still does in Wexford, hard as it may be to believe.

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Even without a dictionary to look in, we all know girl can mean a grown-up.