re: #295 Alyosha

You can get away with calling a girl a ‘sheila’ without raising too many eyebrows if you live in a rural area of if you’re a tradie (someone trade-skilled).
My mother told me to refer to a girl or woman as sheila was disrespectful since it was an overly generic term. I’d now compare it to the word ‘chick’.
A bloke is still a bloke. Unless he’s a ‘geezer’. Though that term, too, has fallen into disuse.

I’ll keep this in mind when I visit Oz. For the record, I don’t think I qualify as a geezer just yet.

In South Africa, they have ‘okes’ — somehow the ‘bl’ got lost. I don’t know if there’s a local equivalent for ‘sheila.”