So this University's next Vice-Chancellor is a girl from the Co Waterford; a TCD MA.
I hope her installation will include a ceremony we see all to rarely in modern Oxford: Incorporation ad eundem.
As a seasoned hibernophile, I would view this appointment with enthusiasm but for the fact that she took a year out from Trinity to go to America and describes the experience as 'liberating'.
Oh dear.
She'll probably end up as president of her home country.
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Ah, Father, would you ever have said, "The new vice-chancellor is a boy from the Co. Waterford"?
Ah, Rose Marie, your soft feminism with its issue-making of insignificant and irrelevant inconsequentials masking it's true intention of upending all that is moral and true, is partly why we are where we are.
Iris Murdoch once said: "I feel unsentimental about Ireland to the point of hatred." As a fellow Hibernian myself I can only agree.
No Rose Marie, I would have written "lad". But, somehow, I've never liked the word "lass". Don't ask me why ...
Michael Leahy, everyone who knows me would laugh to hear me called a feminist, even a soft one. I hate feminism for its lies about both men and women. And the feminist doctrine is a great albatross around the necks of women who are made to feel that they would never have achieved anything if the feminists had not blazed the way. But that does not mean that women are not casually disrespected in many ways, serious and not so serious.
But why are you so uptight? My ilk intends to upend all that is moral and true? Because I asked for a little courtesy? I would have thought the opposite. It is precisely the disrespect for women in contraception and abortion that has helped bring us to where we are.
I hardly launched a rant at Fr. Hunwicke, who, in any case, is well able to take care of himself. I agree with you, Father, about "lass." That's why I didn't suggest it. But "man" and "woman" or even "gentleman" and "lady" have not yet been totally banished and I think we should continue their use. My pastor insists on saying only "individuals" or "persons." Yuck.
Rose Marie, I hope you can please accept my apologies. Please take into account in my defence that, firstly, I don't know you and therefore was unsure where you were coming from. Secondly, you are right that I'm uptight. It is hard for a "no" voter here not to be. I now live by the dictum that just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me.
Is this a private fight, or can anyone join in? I have always been puzzled, since I noticed this, that women in public life seem to go on being "girls" until they are in their forties, whereas men are usually described as men once they have passed twenty. Why is this? Just askin'.
Women often refer to each other as girls even when they`re long-retired. I have a 90 year old friend who talks about lunching with `the girls`. Then she laughs and adds: "They`re all the same age as I am."
Welcome to the brawl, Charlesdawson. But first, I want to accept Michael Leahy's gracious apology and offer sympathy and support for his position in Ireland. I am Irish-American and until a few years ago even had an EC passport because I held Irish citizenship through my grandfather, born in Limerick. Ireland and the Church in Ireland have been on a hard road and the "No" voters have been victimized by their politicians and poorly served, even abandoned, by their clergy. And you are not yet at the bottom of the pit. The U.S. is not very far behind, in all respects. We must pray and fight without ceasing. They are definitely out to get us.
Now, Charlesdawson, I will try to explain, at least from the vernacular spoken in the U.S. Context is all. In an informal context, we are girls as long as we want to be. I might email my friends, "It's time for us girls to have lunch." (We are all well past our 40s.) And if I said to my husband and his friends, "Are you boys ready for another beer?" they would not be offended.
But in a professional or formal setting, boys and girls graduate to men and women at the same time, I would say even at about 18, provided they behave like men and women. On the other hand, I have heard teen-agers, well under 18, referred to as men and women, or young men and women, and thought that pretentious.
And today my pastor reminded me of something else he won't say: "mankind." He insists on "humankind." But that's another issue. Thank God we have Fr. Hunwicke to keep us sane.
My Irish father, RIP, always called my English husband `boy`. " How are you, boy?" Instinctively, my husband felt that my father thought him immature - until I explained that it was a term of endearment which spoke of affection and familiarity, support and trust, welcome.
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