SPINSTERS and bachelors. I begin this week’s comment with these two  words because I know that they mean very different things depending on whether you’re male or female.
If you are a spinster, it implies that no-one will ever marry you and that you are fated to live your life alone until, probably in your 90s, you keel over and die. The word ‘spinster’ suggests an unhappy, unfulfilled, ageing life.
‘Bachelor’, on the other hand, has no age restraints. The word suggests that you can be 65-plus and, still being single, you will attract women no matter how wrinkled you are.
I mention this because a fortnight ago I interviewed El Blazey, a doughty Australian girl who is an opening bat for St Ouen Cricket Club. She didn’t labour the point, but she knows as well as I do that the English language is at least 80 per cent masculine.
Whenever we talk about sports people we automatically assume that they are a he rather than a she. So when journalists write stories about sports people, we slip in the personal pronoun of ‘he’ because we always assume that whoever we write about is a man, not a woman.
And yet there are more women on this earth and, bit by bit, they have inched their way into every sport we play and some of them are as good, if not better, than we men are. Even the phrase ‘and we men are’ places me in the men’s camp. But I can cope with that, having been accused of male sexual bias in years gone by.
The point is that El doesn’t like the word ‘batsman’ when you are talking about a sport played by women. Similarly, she says, we have the words fireman and policeman, which are both unfair because they suggest that no woman should be considered for the job – men’s jobs, not jobs to be done by women.
The English language is, in the main part, masculine. The fact that there are as many women as men who  can write beautifully in our language is irrelevant. So when El, in her own very assertive feminine way, corrects me and talks of ‘batspeople’ or ‘batters’, I can understand her point. You can’t have a ‘woman batsman’.
In the vast scheme of things, it might not be that important, but women cricketers, however good they are, are not men. Yet they can be as good as men. So what were El’s scores in the six-a-side competition at the FB Fields a fortnight  ago? The answer is 30 not out, 20 not out and 18 before the final catch taken by the wicketkeeper.
I mention this because what impressed me most after my interview with El was that her father taught her never to be afraid of the next ball bowled by whoever the opposition might happen to be.
And me? I was afraid of any ball thrown at me which might hit my body rather than the piece of wood I held in front of me.
I mention ‘piece of wood’ purely because I was explaining to a Polish friend how cricket is played (just before his eyes glazed over), when he said that cricket was one of the oddest sports on earth.
And I had to agree with him. He thinks metrically, and wonders why the wickets are 22 feet apart, not 20, or 30.
‘But English people have never thought metrically,’ I said. ‘We have three feet to the yard, we have acres and we have furlongs and we weigh things in pounds and stones. The British have never done metric.’
And then I tried to explain further that Jersey has vergées, which are a law unto themselves – by which time he had lost any real interest.
By mutual agreement, we changed the subject and talked about … the weather.