One of the many joys of the current Bridge production of Guys and Dolls is the refreshing lack of ambiguity when it comes to the sexes. No "107 gender identities" (according to sexualdiversity.org) in sight. Guys are guys and Dolls are dolls and the audience revels in the guilty pleasure of stereotypes that still feel superbly true, as is often the case with great musicals: "When you see a guy reach for stars in the sky/ You can bet that he's doing it for some doll."

The show reminded me of how much I enjoyed it in the early 1990s when "London's rudest landlord", Norman Balon of Soho's Coach and Horses, used to say, "Oi, aren't you that bird who works for Hislop?" At the time, I was the general dogsbody at Private Eye and had to organise the magazine's fortnightly lunches at the pub.

I had grown up watching The Liver Birds and thought of the term signified youthful fun. There were plenty of unprintable words Balon had for people he didn't like and many punters frequented the joint for his reliable spleen. (I must further confess my coven of women friends from the school gates - a TV director, a financial adviser and an academic - are on a WhatsApp group titled "Cambridge Birds")

Balon, however, was running an old-school, 20th-century boozer and it appears there are different rules for upmarket whisky investment companies in 2024. An industrial tribunal has just ruled that when male employees at Whisky1901 called a female co-worker "a bird" - as part of a list of complaints - it could be construed as sexual harassment. The complainant was awarded almost £52,000 in compensation.

Obviously, part of me started calculating the millions owed to me in light of this complaint, if we back date the injury to 1991. While the other side thought, "for Pete's sake", invoking the immortal genius of the Eye's late owner, Peter Cook, who loathed people taking themselves too seriously. Perhaps I'm a traitor to my sex but I've always enjoyed men being as cheerily, robustly rude to me as they are to each other and I love dishing it back. Two male colleagues from Erotic Review days used to be fondly known to the women of the office as "Colonel Raincoat and Sergeant Perv".

I've also long had a tendency to call men I work with "boys", leading to surprise from new friends when they discover my co-worker is 58, not 18. I suppose this tendency to view them as school-age could be deemed patronising but you can only be offended by warm banter if you choose to be. Most women I know are sanguine about, if not openly embracing of, such terms as flower, petal, love, babe, hen, and US versions such as chick.

Fact is, pithy lingo that may or may not be illustrative of the subject's sex is part of the fun of using vernacular. The many viewers currently delighting in Season 4 of Slow Horses are, in part, lapping-up the drama because of Jackson Lamb's insider jargon for MI5 operatives.

The internal investigation officers at "the Park" are known as "dogs", agents in the field are "Joes", while surveillance operatives are "stoats". Lamb's insults to his colleagues are also a visceral pleasure, making it even more thrilling when a hard-nosed woman spy out-viles him. I whooped when new MI5 head of security Emma Flyte says to Lamb while handcuffing him, "I'd rather not take any chances with a man who looks like he gropes people on buses."

None of which means I don't vigorously police my sons' language. Certain words are banned for obvious reasons but I do think context and intention matters with jokier terms. I don't want my boys to treat women like delicate china but as witty flesh-and-blood equals who can out-spar them. Shakespeare believed this too, which is why his greatest heroine is feisty Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. Happily, a stellar new production opens soon with Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston.

We can all revel again in Beatrice's line, "A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours", or it's better to be a smart parrot than a dumb brute.