In addition to ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day’ we could have ‘Write Like a Bisexual Day’, the idea that on that day all soaps and TV dramas have to write dialogue as if everyone were assumed to be bisexual and just happens to be involved with a member of the whichever sex they are involved with a member of on other days. I’m not talking about radical alterations to the plots, just changing dialogue from ‘One day you’ll meet a girl you really like’ to ‘One day you’ll meet a girl or boy you really like’ or, more elegantly perhaps, ‘One day you’ll meet someone with whom you truly click’. And so on.

One of the complications is that many of expressions used to refer to romance don’t work: complaining that your classmate for being obsessed with boys and girls it does not convey the same implication that what you are really complaining about is excessive snogging.

I think this could be interesting in several ways, one of which is that it shows up the amount of sexist and heteronormative language people are exposed to on a daily basis from soaps, which (along with daytime talk shows) are the arbiters of public mores these days.