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Notes -
FWIW, girl has been so normalized as a generic casual word for young-ish woman that it doesn't really register to me the same way as "boy". Boy is pre-puberty; Girl can be anything below ... 40 or so? It functions more like "guy" nowadays, woman would sound stilted to me.
It flows back to societally valuing youth in women and age/experience in men (common idea in this thread), doesn't it? "Boy" is almost insulting to an of-age male in various instances (some related to racism), while "girl" is acceptable because it's considered flattering.
Not endorsing, just observing linguistic implications.
I know a Russian girl who got offended when someone referred to her as a woman. She said it made her sound old.
To move from being called 'madame-moiselle' to 'madame' is an unpleasant right of passage for every young French woman.
Really, the anglosphere is weird in that we think referring to a young woman as a girl might be a bad thing.
Interesting, because even back in the stone age (the early 90's) I was taught that all women above school age who were not personally known to you were "Madame" and that calling an undergraduate-age waitress "Madmoiselle" was hitting on her.
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It does depend. Referring to a girl in her twenties as a girl? Yeah, okay. Referring to a woman of thirty or more, as a lot of early 20th century fiction I've read does, as a girl? It just doesn't fit right. He's a mature man of fifty, established in the world and his career, married to a lovely girl (who you later find out in the narrative is thirty-five). It just sounds odd, as though wives were to be permanent children (and yeah, I've read some ghost stories* where the ostensibly male narrator weeps about his child, his little girl, when his wife has been fridged for plot purposes, which maybe sounded terribly romantic in 1910 but today sounds uncomfortably like Daddies and Littles).
*Man Size In Marble by E. Nesbit. Great story, really spooky, and I want to shake the idiot narrator until his teeth fall out, because just maybe if he treated his wife like an adult woman instead of his little girly-wirly, she would still be alive. Though being fair to him, the wife is a bit of a 'learned helplessness' type who does like being treated like his little girlie and has panic attacks about 'oh no the housekeeper is quitting, I shall have to cook meals and wash dishes!'
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As a side note, I agree. But I think when age-gap relationships are being discussed, it's important to use the words "woman" and "man" so it's clear that we are discussing relationships where neither partner is underage. But yeah, in common parlance, a 25 year old woman is a "girl" and a 25-year old man is a "guy."
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