“This young girl/young female lawyer”: Dalli is so typical of his age, gender and Maltese passport

John Dalli, a 64-year-old Maltese man from the sort of unenlightened background that cuts right across Malta’s different socio-economic groups, has talked repeatedly to the press about a “young female lawyer”.

At his press conference in Brussels a couple of days ago, he even referred to this person as “this young girl”.

God, how I cringed.

Young girl? How can you be a lawyer and also a young girl? A young girl would be about 12.

Now let’s take this business of ‘young’ and why it is being used. If the name of the lawyer being mentioned is correct, then she is not young at all, but 37 years old. That is middle-aged.

Of course, I suppose that to a man of 64, a woman of 37 is young, but she is about as young as the leader of the Labour Party, who is bald and suffers from middle-aged spread.

A lawyer so young that his or her age would be worthy of note would be 24 or 25 and newly graduated.

At 37, why mention it?

Simple, like the word ‘female’ it is used to belittle and in a condescending fashion. And this “young female lawyer”, Dalli was at great pains to point out, knew nothing. She had to ask him.

An older male lawyer wouldn’t have needed to do that.

Now, that “female”: dividing lawyers into male and female, like sexing chickens, is so typically Maltese. First of all, the civilised world tends to speak of woman lawyers, not female lawyers. And secondly, the civilised world does not find it necessary to specify that a lawyer is ‘female’, for all the world as though this is really an unusual thing, like a dog walking on its hind legs.

It is especially ludicrous when you’re talking of Maltese lawyers, because the bulk of them in that age group seem to be women anyway.

There is another reason why I wouldn’t have said those words, besides political correctness and not wishing to seem like an unreconstructed man from the age of Austin Powers. Talk of meetings with “young female lawyers” wanting some of his wisdom makes Dalli seem like that sorry old cliche from the sucker guide.

If somebody had called me a “young female columnist” 10 years ago, he would have got the rollicking from hell.