Some trendy new expressions will probably have the lifespan of a fruit fly (for the scientifically minded, that’s between 30 and 50 days). And the new compound noun ‘girl dinner’ will surely be one of those expressions. The hyper-hip online Urban Dictionary has recorded this since July last year (so, I guess, it has already outlived your average Drosophila melanogaster). And now the New York Times has taken it up. Yes, the expression ‘girl dinner’ is being promoted by the same publication that told us the Hunter Biden laptop was a fake and Trump-Russia collusion was true. In the case of ‘girl dinner,’ the NYT says it is a meal concocted from whatever happens to be in the fridge by a young woman, living alone in her apartment. They say a ‘girl dinner’ is (somehow) both liberating and empowering presumably, because she doesn’t need anyone else, and there’s no cooking involved. The Urban Dictionary definition of a ‘girl dinner’ is ‘a dinner that consists of many different kinds of small appetizers/snacks rather than just one entrée.’ So, depending on what’s in the fridge, a ‘girl dinner’ might (according to the New York Times) consist of ‘fruit, a block of cheddar, sliced salami, [some] fancy crackers and a dish of olives.’ Well, I have some news for the New York Times: (a) this sort of meal has been called ‘grazing’ for the last fifty years, and (b) it’s what teenage boys have always done. And for those who suffer from ‘night starvation’ this is exactly the kind of meal they grab out of the fridge at midnight. So, will the compound noun ‘girl dinner’ catch on? That’s about as likely as a fruit fly living long enough to get a telegram from the King. (What is likely is that someone at the New York Times Lifestyle section had too much time on their hands.)