“No man my age would submit to being called ‘a boy’, for example.”

Actually, I’ve found plenty don’t care, as long as they can still call me a girl. They would only take offense at a MAN calling them a boy.

Ha. Well, I would very much like to squeeze a couple of them myself – am not as organized about what’s coming in the next few weeks as I would like to be!

Ooh! Secrets! Like gift wrapped presents from Auntie Hodge that I can’t even squeeze as yet.

Yeah. I’m counting it as one of the Alphabet’s successes that, as I’m going through, I find the same sort of issues coming back time after time, and thus creating a space for discussion and dialogue about them from lots of different angles. I really hope this is something everyone can engage in.

I’m also sort of mentally pairing words up – with luck, by the end there’ll be a series of different linguistic approaches to several key feminist issues – social, medical, legal, sartorial, sexual, familial etc: infant and girl are obvious allies, but so too, I hope, will be Hysteria, U and O; X and J; S and N… but that’s all a secret :)

So, the sense is that the more infantile women are the lovelier they are? Has anybody written that the more articulate and assertive women are the lovelier they are?

Alas for wordcounts. They have never been my friends. This in itself, however, serves the rest of the world a shielding purpose.

I’d have let that one in, it made me smile! My dad is the same :)

I had problems with this too. I think the key is that ‘she’s’ is being used as a noun – ‘the loveliest she’ = ‘the loveliest woman’. So then the ‘she’s’ must be ‘[woman] is’ and I assumed that ‘express’d’ meant ‘described as’ or ‘resembling’. ‘And still the more she lives and knows’ – ‘despite the unavoidable knowledge you acquire simply by existing’, ‘the loveliest [type of?] woman is still like a child’. I think.

But I am happy to bow to any superior knowledge, cos it doesn’t *quite* sound perfect…

Ha. That’s funny – in the first draft I had the exact same example: ‘flammable’ was one of my granddad’s pet hates. Sadly had to be removed for reasons of space….