Word: girlish
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...cookie gaffe, in which she asserted she'd had better things to do, as a Governor's wife, than bake cookies for Chelsea and Bill, she took to compensatory cookie making on an industrial scale. Stung by Whitewater allegations, she did penance by giving a press conference in girlish pink. What can we expect if the Gingrich remark provokes yet another make-over? A floor-length Mother Hubbard gown of handloomed calico...
...post-teen set -- more than one writer has called twentysomethings the Winona Generation -- there is a quality in her dark, Walter Keane-eyed beauty that pulls her out of her time and into the crinolined past. No modern actress has her watchfulness, her fiery reticence, her gift of girlish blush and fluster. Nobody else even tries to monitor the intelligent, expectant heart beating in a virgin's breast. The true Ryder heroine is a gentle soul in tremulous transition to maturity. Not a fairy-tale princess, either, but a bright child, ripe for romance, who opens a storybook and eagerly...
...authors then went on to describe several flighty statements they could imagine these staff members making as a result of their "girlish enthusiasm:" e.g. citing Kennedy's "outstanding swimming ability" as a reason to support him as senator...
This blatant association of "girlish[ness]" with an ability to formulate well-reasoned, logical opinions resonated loudly with the previous day's debate. Here was an unambiguously negative use of a term denoting femaleness, in which the negative implications sprang from the very gender being invoked. One could not ignore the gendered root of this word, without losing the idea it was expressing: that certain people acted in a way characteristic of young females, by arguing a point in an irresponsible, giddy manner...
...female and a member of a youthful age-bracket, cannot help but consider the word "girlish," in the context in which it was used, related to myself. If a person unquestioningly accepts a connection between being a girl and being unable to speak rationally, I cannot help but feel that this person attacks me and my girl-friends...