Philosophy: Adult human females should be called ‘women’—if only for the sake of consistency in our linguistic practice. And just to be clear, by ‘adult’, I mean a person 18 years old or older, whether that person is a high school student or a university student or a clerk or a construction worker or whatever. 18 year-old “girls” have the ability to be mothers, so I don’t see how we can consistently use a non-adult word to talk about them. Likewise, they have the ability to vote, and surely anyone with that ability deserves to be talked about as a grown-up, not a child. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to go to silly extremes. If you’d rather say ‘young woman’ than just ‘woman’ in some cases, I couldn’t object, since an 18 year-old is certainly young in comparison to most other adults, and if you want to call women ‘girls’ and men ‘boys’ in some circumstances where it’s appropriate as a metaphor, such as when the men are acting boyishly or the women girlishly, then there’s no harm in that either. The main thing to which I object is using a word for children as though it literally applied to adults also. I guess that’s the main objection I have: ‘girl’ is a word for a human female child, and to call women ‘girls’ is to imply that they are children, which is inaccurate and probably has other negative consequences.