Yeah, i agree. To me, there’s a huge difference between “…one of the girls/boys in (name of dept)” and “my girl.”
You can be offended by whatever you want but the rest of us realize that there’s an equivocation with the word ‘girl’ where it can be either paired with guy or boy. As in, “Tell that girl/boy to get off the slide” or “Tell those girls/guys to get into the conference room.” Girl can be the female equivalent to guy, as a casual way to refer to an adult, or it can be the female equivalent to boy, as in a child.
I mean, you really can take personal affront to it, I’m not trying to stop you. But I think you’d have an easier time at life if you realized that when people call adult women ‘girls’ they would be calling adult men in the same situation ‘guys’, not ‘boys’. It’d be great if there were a casual word for women like ‘guys’. “gals” is great and spot on except it’s not commonly used. I couldn’t call people gals with a straight face, for one.
For what it’s worth, I make a point of not calling the women who work for me girls because I don`t want to risk them misunderstanding it the way you do. But I just make sure to use names instead. I’m not going to say “ladies” or “women” as the female equivalent of “guys” because it’s not equivalent in formality.
DrDeth has nailed it, Fuzzy Dunlop. It’s not just “the girls” that grates – it’s “my girl” or “the girl” (the latter usually when speaking about a housekeeper). When was the last time you heard someone say “I’ll have my boy send that over” or “I’ll have the boy clean it up”? Yuck. It’s infantalizing and proprietary. The more collegial “tell the girls and guys in the conference room…” isn’t anything like that.
Meh. I can’t get worked up over that. My manager, the most cautiously PC person I know, will walk into our cube, rubbing his hands and say “OK, guys - and gals - where are we today?” It’s always done with a nod and a smile, and we know he’s trying to be inclusive. It’s just a quirk, and it offends no one (except our lone Anal Offenderazi, who gets her attitude with extra Bitch sauce every day).
:rolleyes: This is clearly not what has been talked about. “Hey guys” or “hey girls” is not offensive in any way. “My girl” or “the girl” is what we’re talking about.
These are the same people who will make racist remarks on the phone to a support person (a black co-worker was treated to a broker using the n-word about someone who walked in the broker’s office) or will flat out tell female techs to, “get a man on the line, honey; I need this fixed.”
So, yeah, “The girl can’t get into (x program)” is more offensive than, “Sandra can’t get into (x program)”.
Two incidents in the show I thought were great, and these aren’t spoilers. (At least one happens early in the first season anyway.) One is when Sally, the little girl, comes running in with a cellophane dry-cleaning bag over her head. Betty, the mother, is shocked! At first you think it’s because Sally could suffocate, but no. The mother warns the girl that the dry cleaning had better not be dumped out all over the place. I remember all the real-life reports back about that time about children suffocating by doing just this. Parents at the time just seemed clueless about it.
Another one is when the Draper family has a picnic, and they just dump all their trash onto the park grounds before drivimg off. I remember people doing just that!
Those are just two examples, but they keep slipping these sorts of things in, and they always stir a memory.
I loved those, but I feel they really backed off of those little moments in the subsequent seasons. Maybe they thought it was too Wonder Years or something, but miss that stuff.
It’s “realism”. Not “realisticness”