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I’m Not a Girl
Why do we call women girls? What makes it acceptable?
When someone says, I met a girl at the office today, nobody flinches. But if you said, I met a boy at work, the first reaction would be, What was a kid doing at the office? Because the word boy calls up an image of a child, but apparently the word girl does not.
My first question is why?
Different dictionaries have different definitions of girl and boy. But if you look at the two definitions from Merriam-Webster below, you will see it appears that they carry equal weight. So why doesn’t society treat them equally?
In Merriam-Webster’s Thesaurus, you can find one entry that defines a girl as a young unmarried woman. The synonyms listed can accurately portray the connotation of the word girl, or assumptions that can be made even unconsciously.
In the Learner’s Dictionary, the one I usually refer to when teaching children, there is a note that using the word girl to refer to an…
