Enough of this girl talk!

 

ENOUGH OF THIS GIRL TALK!

 

 

GIRLS will be girls, they say, but not according to new guidelines by right-on education chiefs in Liverpool - they are “female humans” if they are under the age of 18. 

Under a new hyper-sensitive speech regime, words such as "manpower, manning, man-made, man-hours and chairman" will be dumped as “sexist.” 

Instead they will be replaced by "workforce, staffing, artificial, work-hours and chair” (funny, I thought chair was a piece of furniture you sat on). 

The word “manhole” has also been banned and staff must watch their language to avoid being racist - for example they must say “chalk-board” instead of "black-board”! 

PRE-WOMAN GUIDES

This comes hot on the heels of the dear old Girl Guides (founded in 1910) officially dropping the “girl” from their title. So what should we now call them - “Pre-woman Guides"?

It may be politically correct to avoid so-called chauvinistic, homophobic or disablist terms, but in practice, surely nobody will take this seriously - least of all Liverpool, where every Scouser and Scousess call people “luv”? 

Speaking as a visually-impaired pen-person, I find it all rather OTT and smacks of Big Brother - or should that be “Older Sibling”?

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A REAL REBEL OR JUST A PRO?

WHATEVER the outcome, the arrest of Axl Rose on assault charges this week will only increase the street cred of the so-called “Wild Man of Rock.” 

There are those, however, who suspect the rock rebel image is a carefully cultivated ploy by the outrageous Guns ’N’ Roses singer (whose very name is an anagram of “oral sex”). 

And considering Mr Rose wears skirts on stage and has a personal chef, herbalist and astrologist in his entourage, Smith on Saturday is inclined to agree with them!

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PETROL STATION BURGER!

In my recent SOS piece on the opening of McDonald’s burger bars in Tesco stores, I jokingly suggested that before long, we would be buying chips from our local petrol station. 

Unknown to myself, a new service station less than 300 yards from this office has a “chip machine” which cooks not only chips from a nearby freezer, but also mini-sausages, chicken nuggets and coated burger bites! 

And they say truth is stranger than fiction..

(This column was originally published in the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph on Saturday, 18 July, 1992