How the word "girl" was canceled in the 1970s, and then brought back

If you're old enough to remember the song "The girl from Ipanema", and thought nothing of it being a description of a full-grown woman (probably in her twenties) that the singer is having romantic thoughts about, you can remember a time before the word "girl" was cancelled. But it came back just a few years later.

Yes, "cancel culture" is really nothing new. And it means that something that everyone thought was perfectly acceptable one moment is considered wildly offensive the next. And a lot of older people really can't keep up with it, and it can be frustrating. I'll see if I can explain what happened to the word "girl".

The 1970s brought a lot of changes that kinda started in the 1960s. Equal rights were moving from just a brand new idea in the law to changing attitudes by ordinary people. The Women's Liberation Movement (usually just called "Women's Lib") was fighting hard to give equal opportunity to women in many things, including jobs. Things entered the language, such as postal worker instead of mailman, firefighter instead of fireman, that sort of thing. Looking back now it just seems logical, but having the word "man" built into a job made people prejudiced against seeing a woman in that job. Language is a powerful thing. And the word "girl" just had to go. It only described someone who was a little girl, you know, with pigtails giggling and skipping.

If you're already getting huffy about it, and saying "What's the big deal?", I'd like to remind you that the word "boy" had been cancelled even before I was born, which was over sixty years ago. The bathrooms in my school may have been labelled "boys" - but no one ever called me that, even when I was a little kid. I was always called "a fine upstanding young man!" (although I'm sure that I was a little brat!). "Boy" was insulting, and words like "Bellboy" had long been replaced with "Bellhop".

Boy has never returned, but girl has. I'm inclined to give credit to Madonna (who is my age), who sang "Material Girl" in the 1980s. She was 26 when she recorded that, and it must have been shocking to people around her that she chose to use the word "girl" in that song. And then I watched the word girl return, and by the 1990s no one gave a second thought to "Swing Out Sister" singing, "Am I the same girl you used to know?"

But I have vivid memories of how terrible it was to accidentally use the word girl in the 1970s to describe a full-grown woman. I remember a paperback book that I checked out of the library (some detective novel I think) where someone had carefully crossed out the word "girl" each time it appeared and replaced it with "woman".

I still cringe a bit when I find myself using the word "girl", but my grey hair protects me - elderly people are cut some slack you know. But I'm really too young to be comfortable with it, or too old, or whatever.

Thank you for the encouragement! If you want to see daily pics of my adventures on my recumbent trike in suburban Phoenix (just for fun, of course!) you can follow me on buymeacoffee.com/bradhall, and you can buy me a coffee if you'd like to!