Women have been called an awful lot worse than ‘girls’ …
On Wednesday September 24, I ventured forth from Dublin Airport, bound for Bilbao and a week-long Camino walk of 112 miles. No, dear readers, I am not going to bore, burden or blind you with another Camino commentary, but I need to set the scene for this week’s story.
At the airport, I purchased a copy of that day’s Irish Independent. Due to the nature of the week that was in it, the paper stuck around with me all week… crossword and reading bits I might otherwise have skipped at home, where I have it online. As I often tell you, I love the feel of a real newspaper. (None more so than this one!)
But God help us, isn’t the news so depressing these days? And yet, it is the responsibility of our priceless journalists to keep giving us these horror stories and it is the duty each one of us readers not to look away. As an elderly German historian said recently; ‘this is how it happened in my country; one third want to kill another third, whilst the other third look on and do nothing’.
The genocide continues in Gaza; Putin laughs all the way to the ballistic; and the world peeks to see what toys Trump has thrown out of his pram today.
As I say, we cannot become insensitised to the horror that fellow humans are being subjected to. You might imagine that such stories carried in that day’s ‘Indo’ would occupy my head in the course of a 20-mile daily walk. But no, strangely it was an article by Sinéad Ryan on page 27 of the paper that really got under my skin.
The world is collapsing inwards all around us but what is bothering Ms Ryan is that our latest national treasure and World Athletics silver medallist was called a ‘girl’ and ‘young lady’ – and not a ‘woman’ during RTÉ’s sports commentary. (Kate O’Connor is 24) Jazus Christ… is it just me? Tell me if I’m just getting too old for this craic?
Sinéad Ryan took Darren Frehill and Greg Allen (two of the best in the business) to task for not calling the female athlete a woman and comparing the fact that our other Irish hero Cian McPhillips wasn’t referred to as a boy. Let me deal with ‘boy’ first. The writer should know that calling a male ‘Boy’ has different connotations to the opposite of female. This goes back to segregation in America; where ‘boy’ was next to the ‘N’ word. Something similar in Ireland, dating back to the landlords… mature men being ‘servant boys’ and so on.
How can anybody find it offensive to call a female a girl? I have a middle-aged daughter and people regularly remark to me; ‘Olga is a lovely girl.’ Am I now supposed to confront these people and straighten them out on their offensive language?
Frehill or Allen didn’t call Kate (am I allowed to use her Christian name?) a ‘wench’ a ‘slapper’ a ‘biddy’ or a ‘bimbo’. They referred to her, in glowing terms, as a ‘young lady’ and a ‘girl’.
So, if the sizzling sisterhood now wants ‘girl’ and ‘young lady’ sidelined to the politically incorrect songbook, there is a lot of work to be done internationally in order to change the language of the different countries. Let’s start with our own Irish language. Will ‘cailín’ be banned altogether and the word ‘bean’ used instead at all times? The French are good at doing the revolution thingy, so you would have to question what the reaction will be when they are told that in future no French woman is ‘mademoiselle’, but that every young female in the country is a ‘madame’.
The Spanish… they don’t react very well to needless nonsense. I do a weekly bit for ‘The Leader’, an English language newspaper in that country, and I could break it to our readers that they are not to call their young women ‘señorita’ any more – it has to be ‘señora’ all the time. I could do it, I suppose… but lookit, I’d prefer if you did it yourself, Sinéad!
Is ‘Ladies Day’ at the races now gone? This used take the pain out of losing a few bob for us ‘boys’. And what about titled ladies? Is Lady Di now to be known as ‘Woman Di’?
In my sheltered world around the not-inconsiderable sophistication of County Westmeath, I have never met a female of any age who objected to being referred to as a girl. Yes, we do know the difference and would never call someone like Mary Robinson a ‘girl’, for example.
Page 27 of the paper in question had ‘comment’ at the top. Sinéad Ryan has had her comment and now we have had ours. And as I’m sure Sinéad will agree, we all in this business have a best column… and a worst one!
Last word on Kate O’Connor, Kate, you are a mighty bit of stuff!
Don’t Forget
How come you can still purchase a decent cup of coffee for €1.50 and even €1.20 in the village café bars along the Camino trail? Just think what we would do if we had captive customers like that!