Aging & Wisdom Quote by Tom Lehrer

Lehrer lands the punch with a magician’s misdirection: you brace for a bawdy confession about old-fashioned manners, and instead you get an indictment of modern linguistic panic. The setup evokes a midcentury code of “decency” where men policed their own mouths around women, not out of respect so much as out of a paternalistic idea of female fragility. Then he flips it: today the taboo isn’t the dirty word, it’s the category word. “Girl” becomes the supposedly hazardous object, a term treated as socially radioactive because it can signal infantilization, sexism, or casual disregard for adult womanhood.

The intent isn’t to defend crude language; it’s to mock the way moral regulation migrates rather than disappears. Lehrer’s subtext is that every era congratulates itself on progress while inventing new shibboleths to prove it. His comic economy matters: one syllable - girl - stands in for sprawling arguments about identity, power, and who gets to name whom. The joke works because it’s plausibly true in everyday conversation, where speakers now do real-time risk assessment: “woman” feels formal, “girl” feels suspect, “female” can sound clinical or hostile, “ladies” can feel patronizing. That tension makes ordinary speech feel like a minefield, which is exactly the kind of cultural absurdity Lehrer loved to needle.

Contextually, Lehrer is the cold-eyed musical satirist of the postwar American boom, a guy who watched public virtue campaigns, etiquette, and politics all weaponize language. Here he’s pointing at a new etiquette regime - not prudish, but performatively enlightened - and reminding us that taboo is less about purity than about control.