Really, really good points, especially about "guy" and its corresponding lack of a casual, female equivalent. Unfortunately, "girl" conveys a sort of latent, se

Really, really good points, especially about "guy" and its corresponding lack of a casual, female equivalent. Unfortunately, "girl" conveys a sort of latent, sexist diminution, such that the phrase "Product Girl" is dismissive. As a man, I'd cringe if another man described a female coworker as "Product Girl," in much the same way I cringed in the Entertainment business whenever a female creative exec was referred to as "Development Girl" (or its even more diminutive form, "D-Girl"). "Gal" feels hokey and anachronistic to me, and I'm sure it falls tinny on a lot of this readership's ears. For whatever it's worth, though, I've been noticing that the word is making a steady comeback. I have no personal n-gram analyzer in my daily life (and I wish I did!), but I could swear I have heard "gal" more times in the last two years than I had in the preceding 20. I've heard it from men (and the first time I did, it struck me as weird and Mad Men-esque), and I've heard it from women (most typically, women currently in their late '20s to mid '30s). In a weird way, I'm almost rooting for it. Our language needs a casual term for women that is not latently diminutive and, thus, a micro-aggressive power play the way "girl" often is (whether its user intends it to be or not).