Is it ever ok to call women ‘birds’?

Towards the end of the 1980s, Jeffrey Bernard, late of this magazine, sometimes used to wear grey shoes with jeans and a blazer. Those grey shoes, if ever fashionable, were out of fashion by then, like referring to young women as birds. But his writerly disposition once encouraged him to call an intimate acquaintance who had a Candida infection ‘a black bird with thrush’.

In A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Orwell describes a ruffianly retailer of trousers who ‘kept a sharp eye open for the “birds”, as he called them’, with ‘lecherous’ intent. But a Brisbane newspaper reported from London in 1964: ‘You haven’t really been given top-of-the-pops praise by your boyfriend unless he has called you a Dolly Bird.’ Now I see that a woman working at a whisky investment company has been awarded £51,776 after hearing colleagues use terms for women such as bird, which the judge found derogatory. It’s no good saying that in Old English bird regularly referred to women.