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Mind your language

Is it ever ok to call women ‘birds’?

12 October 2024

9:00 AM

12 October 2024

9:00 AM

Towards the end of the 1980s, Jeffrey Bernard, late of this magazine, sometimes used to wear grey shoes with jeans and a blazer. Those grey shoes, if ever fashionable, were out of fashion by then, like referring to young women as birds. But his writerly disposition once encouraged him to call an intimate acquaintance who had a Candida infection ‘a black bird with thrush’.

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