While it's hard to pinpoint exactly what's causing the uptick, we suspect "girl" is shedding some of its older, more negative connotations. The word doesn't mean the same thing to millennials and Gen X as it does to boomer women — or anyone who had to endure being called "girl" by a male boss she fetched coffee for. "It's what I call, 'shit my mom had to put up with,'" says Mignon Fogarty, founder of Grammar Girl and author of The New York Times bestseller, Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. We talked to her, along with a few other language experts, to figure out what's going on with the word "girl." Have we all just agreed it's the female word for guy?We wouldn't be the first to search for the guy equivalent. In 2013, Ann Friedman argued that "lady" was the messiah of a word in the New Republic — the one, she wrote, that "splits the difference between the infantilizing 'girl' and the stuffy, Census-bureau cold 'woman.'" A year earlier, The Atlantic declared "gal" to be that word, as if that were something anyone said without lacing it with irony first. Both come with a certain level of affectation and self-awareness. They are what we say when choosing our words carefully, but "girl" is unfiltered. Girl is what we say when we aren't choosing our words at all.If there was ever a place to not choose our words carefully, it's social media and the internet at large. It's the longest casual conversation ever had, and a stark contrast to the standard world of journalism. There, AP Style , the governing guide, ensures that any female 18 and over is identified as a woman. Until 20 years ago, everything passed through this filter, which makes it nearly impossible to say exactly how "girl" was used previously. Is it more common now, or are our conversations just more public?