7 Culturess writers on the word ‘girl’

(Image courtesy Shea Corrigan)

1. Shea Corrigan

So, first, I think there’s a distinction to be made between the vocabulary used in formal, professional contexts and that which is used conversationally. In the former, it’s easy: Woman or women. There is a word for a grown girl and that word is woman.
But conversationally, that’s a little harder, because many women, myself included, will admit that “women” sounds stiff, especially in contrast to the magically chill designation, “guy.” “Guy” can apply to any man from the day his voice cracks until he begins to receive AARP fliers in the mail, regardless of whether he’s a stranger, coworker, acquaintance, ex, etc.

And so I face the girl question most when telling stories about women I can’t describe any other way and whose ages I guess to be between 19 and 35. (I am horrifically bad at gauging age though, so, really, that window is even wider.) A woman, to me, is a grown-up and I don’t often think of women in my peer group, plus or minus five years, as grown-ups, because I forget I am a grown-up, even though we very much are.

As an aside, I don’t like particularly like “ladies” either, because ladies feels oppressively positive and, to me, has become tied to a certain style of white feminism about which I, for lack of 3,000 more words at my disposal, feel a type of way. Which is to say, my problem with “ladies” is very much a me-thing.

“Gals,” I’m told, is another option for reclamation. And then there’s still “girl.” I actually like and use “girl” quite a lot, but only in direct address and mostly as a less intense synonym for “bitch”—as in “Girl, what?”

But the more I think about this—the more I think about how I use language and slang, the more I think about the words I use and why I use them, which is a thing I do a lot these days—the more I’ve become comfortable with using “women” anecdotally too.