A good piano tuner can tell when a note resonates perfectly. Such was the feeling in some circles when The New York Sun came up with female dollar as a description of the imagined state of things if President Obama were to appoint Janet Yellen as the head of the Federal Reserve. So right-on was the term that The Wall Street Journal, no slavish admirer of the Sun’s journalistic standards, picked it up right away, defining it, in regard to Ms. Yellen, as a “default policy” to “keep spiking the punchbowl.”
Women, of course, are usually in charge of the punchbowl, and I suppose spiking it makes everyone happy. But being in favor of quantitative easing doesn’t altogether explain the ring of female dollar. It sounds like a term we’ve been carrying around inside us for a long time—and indeed, though a Google Ngram shows almost no use of it in the last two centuries, there are…