Nobody cares about this, but I think it is interesting and important. It’s about the way we use language to describe ourselves.

Charlie’s Angels was a hit TV show in the late 70s.

I looked at the transcripts of 17 episodes broadcast in 1978. 1)

The show is about 3 women in their late 20s. The actresses are in their late 20s. So logically we should hear the word woman, or women, a lot, right?

Women 27 times in the singular and 15 times in the plural. 42 times altogether. 2)

The word girl, however appears 120 times, with the plural form showing up 61 times, for a grand total of 181 instances.

I watched all 17 of these episodes. There are no females who even remotely qualify as girls. There are no children. There aren’t any women under 20. 3)

In all of those instances the word girl is being used to describe an adult woman.

This was a mainstream show. It was seen by lots and lots of people. It was not an outlier. This was normal television. 4)

The original pilot, broadcast in 1976, has a scene where one character tells another “There’s a young girl at the door”

The character was clearly an adult woman in her late 20s. The actress playing her was 31 at the time. That qualifies as “young girl”?!?! 5)