She’s my mom, so of course she’s going to disagree when I say something not usually considered controversial, such as “The sky is blue.” 

Mom, shaking head: “Oh no; tsk, tsk; the sky isn’t blue.”

Still, her take on looking good shocked me. She actually said, “It’s important to be pretty. Everyone knows pretty people are nicer, because they have to be, so they aren’t just liked for being pretty.” Mom has apparently met neither pretty people nor nice ones; she takes the old-fashioned phrase ”pretty is as pretty does” backwards and literally. 

Speaking of “literally,” there are those, like me, who struggle with the shifting of that word’s meaning. At our age, shifts come with creaks and groans and the occasional dislocation.

When I hear the now-famous Barbie movie words by America Ferrera, “It’s literally impossible to be a woman,” my mind, fossilized in the late 1900s by decades of proofreading, reflexively shouts “NO! There’s a whole bunch of women out here in the real, not Barbie, world, not finding their existence impossible.” 

But of course Ferrara Barbie is using Merriam-Webster’s second definition:

Literally, adverb: 1. in a literal manner or sense; exactly. 

2. INFORMAL, used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true.

So, literally meaning NOT literally. 

Ferrara Barbie goes on: ”You are so beautiful and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough.”

Well, of course they are beautiful. They are Barbies and reasonable facsimiles thereof. And while perhaps they think they’re smart, they’re not so good at holding a job. (Even the literalist I am understands Ferrara Barbie is not actually dying.) 

Merriam-Webster: BEAUTY is the quality or group of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or the mind : loveliness; ...

It’s been earnestly explained to me that here Barbie means “inner beauty”—an expression that makes me worried whether my spleen is adequately toned and trim. 

[Ed. note: “Oh, to have a dazzling spleen

A pancreas of loveliness

An appendix of which dreams are made

A gumline so compelling...” OK Leah, I’ll stop now; sorry, sorry.]

Do seven-year-olds understand that people mean “You have a beautiful soul” when they say “You are beautiful”?

Or does a seven-year-old think, “Oh, I’m supposed to look good. Girls are supposed to be pretty,” as per my mom? 

I am speaking from the vantage point of a girl who came home from college bursting with excitement about the world of ideas. My PhD’ed father said he didn’t understand the freshman essay I proudly presented to him, but my upper arms were a bit too heavy and ‘“we’ll have to work on that.” Curiously, David Sedaris, who is my age with a similar background, tells a nearly identical story about his own dad and sister. 

The concern about their daughters’ upper arms’ circumferences could be particular to Greek American fathers. Fortunately my dad died 20 years before he could be exposed to the horror of my arms today, which are about the same size now as my waist was then. 

I have this wild idea which might help to avoid any confusion in seven- or 67-year-olds. We could just use different words:

Like, Really cool. 

Or, Miraculous creature. 

Or, Really irritating but with a good heart.

Or, Great souled. 

Or, Perfectly adequately souled.

Or, Magnificent person.

Or, Kinda full of themselves, but it’s OK: they’re good. 

Or, They’ll grow out of it soon. 

Or, Not nearly as funny as they think they are.

Or, Mr. Rogers would have liked you just the way you are. 

Or, Good enough, smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like you! 

My goodness, there’re multitudes of words with which we could encourage girls. We could make self-esteem-raising public service announcements that use them, or compose Barbie movie speeches with them—words that are not intimately associated with appearance.

So why don’t we?