The Girls in Their Summer Whatchamacallits

"The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" is a lovely title, and a lovely sight in real life, is it not? (Or, are they not?) It's a bittersweet (as I recall) short story by Irwin Shaw. Here's a link to it, the accuracy of which I can't vouch for. It is also a song by Airborne Toxic Event (never heard of them until about 4 minutes ago) and by Glenn Yarbrough as well (baby, the rain must fall.)

But to talk about "the girls in their summer dresses" is an anachronism -- on many counts. "Girls," as Shaw used the word, comes from the MadMen era, when the word referred to grown women, or at least those becoming grown up. It was the era of, "Have my girl call your girl," which the white-shirted exec (male) would declare.

It's also an anachronism, more or less, but not entirely, with respect to "dresses," correct? Today, Shaw would have had to have written "tank tops" or "shorts" or "tee shirts" or "capris" or "you're going out in public in that?!" or . . . something. I'm not sure of all this; my sartorial acumen is limited. My realm of interest is words and wordplay and musings thereof.

[Dear Reader: I'm done with this topic. Thought I had something worthy of a post, some semantic murmurings, some verbal ponderings.

Now I'm not so sure.

Where was I going with this?

And where would you meander to, syntactically and semantically?

Sigh.]