Is it ever ok to call women ‘birds’?

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’.

In A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Orwell describes a ruffianly retailer of trousers who ‘kept a sharp eye open for the “birds”, as he called them’, with ‘lecherous’ intent. But a Brisbane newspaper reported from London in 1964: ‘You haven’t really been given top-of-the-pops praise by your boyfriend unless he has called you a Dolly Bird.’ Now I see that a woman working at a whisky investment company has been awarded £51,776 after hearing colleagues use terms for women such as bird, which the judge found derogatory. It’s no good saying that in Old English bird regularly referred to women. The word has been through a lot since then, and was strange in the first place. No parallel forms are found in Germanic languages. To complicate things, an unrelated word birde, coming from the same roots as birth, was used of children in the Middle Ages. In modern times we insulate from each other the different meanings of bird: the feathered kind, but also male kinds, such as a wiley old bird. A specialised meaning for bird, from the 16th century, was a ‘prisoner’, as in jailbird. Yet doing bird is rhyming slang, in use since the 1850s, from birdlime = time.

To flip someone the bird is an American term (used only since the 1960s) for a one-fingered gesture, but to give someone the bird is a British term, originally theatrical, from hissing like geese, from at least as early as the 1820s.