Well, looks like the consensus is that the slang “bird” is alive and well in the UK with the young generation at this late date, even if not near its early 1970s peak. Somehow I find that pretty cool to know. Thanks to all.
Well, that’s because the Original Poster himself is a bit peculiar; I was definitely using “girl” meaning a young woman definitely of age, as in “Damn this bar is a sausage-fest tonight, where the hell are the girls?” - heck, women use the term to refer to themselves (“Girls’ Night Out”); we also would use “Chicks”, although that’s a bit cruder - “cruising Guido style: Dudes in front, Chicks in the back”; we probably wouldn’t have said “where are the women” as that just sounds too “Conan the Barbarian” like; and in Reagan’s America, “Birds” would have been right out - not sure about Canada though.
That fits well with TV Brit-Com usage, guys (Mates? Blokes? Lads? Buddies? whatever) talking among each other about chatting up the birds and such.
Yep, I’ve seen that clip before (a throwaway bit before the end of the show explaing why you should vacation in Britian), and not only is Jeremy (“YOU PILLOCK!”) Clarkson NOT the younger generation, but Clarkson in Top Gear presenter mode is the very definition of Ironic usage…
To clarify a couple of points from up-thread, I am a he, and from the South-West of England. My usage of the term is exactly in line with what Colophon described. It does have a slightly sexist connotation, I think - you won’t find many women using it.
Female Brit, early 40s. It’s still used, I would associate it with the south of england/London although I’m not sure that’s right.
It’s pretty sexist and in these more enlightened times I doubt a family show like the Two Ronnies would write that joke. It’s the sort of word a bloke might use amongst his male friends, but if he used it on his wife it might prompt a look, and if used in polite, mixed company would make him look like an un-reconstructed oaf.
Just to add another data point, I’m male, I’ve lived in a few different towns in the Midlands and the South and I’ve never heard it used outside of TV.
Well, people tend to notice if they use bird in a sentence if there’s a possible double entendre there. But that seems to be the limit of its powers now IME.
On TV it still gets the occasional use but I think it’s largely the scriptwriter’s poor idea of street slang than reflective of real frequency of use.
Female Brit, early 40s. It’s still used, I would associate it with the south of england/London although I’m not sure that’s right./QUOTE]
Definitely heard it in Lancashire/Manchester in the last decade or so (don’t live there now, so not sure about precisely current usage). Quite a few lads I knew who would now be in their early 30s would refer to their girlfriends as ‘me bird’, at least when she wasn’t around.
Wouldn’t really hear it in the north much, if you did it would be from one of those people who likes to show off their entire vocabulary in the pub by using every synonym they know while telling their dreary stories.
I’m in my 40’s and you hear it used here and there but really not so much. Used to be a London thing but now hear it more up north - interestingly where there is less black immigration. M’bird is definately in use in Newcastle currently, just from a stag do I went to there the other month.
I always think of it as young white slang, so maybe when the youth of London and other southern urban centres moved over to psuedo-Jamaican slang it’s use crashed.
I use it non-ironically and so do my friends. It’s also very commonly used to mean girlfriend - I use it in that way myself. Nothing sexist is intended or taken by it among my friends, and I’m 36 and a lesbian. Most of my friends are pretty left-wing and active against sexism, so perhaps it’s taken for granted that the word isn’t intended to be sexist?
It’s pretty much an exact corrolary to bloke IME, including using bloke for boyfriend. Our experiences on this thread do seem to vary widely.
That said, I do remember in the eighties people claiming that it was a sexist term, and it being frowned upon.
AFAIK it’s never meant young woman, btw - it just means woman. If someone said ‘that bird over there’ and you looked over and saw two women, one fifty years old and one twenty years old, you’d need more clarification.
It’s actually “blood”, that spelling just reflects how it’s pronounced. It’s used by young black people in some parts of the US as well I think (in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if it stems from the Bloods gang).
I think it would depend on the age of the speaker. As I said before, I think it always (at least as used non-ironically) caries a mild sexual connotation. It implies a woman in whom the speaker (or possibly the person they are talking to) might, at least in principle, be sexually interested (or, at least, a woman that it would be socially acceptable for them to be interested in). That is why it would not be used of a child, but also not normally of a woman a great deal older (or younger) than the speaker. As the word is mostly used by young men, in practice it usually refers to a young woman, but yes, an elderly man (or an elderly lesbian, I guess) might refer to a woman of his (or her) own age group as a “bird”. (I dare say heterosexual women sometimes use it amongst themselves, too, but in such cases I think some irony is probably intended.)
