As an Essex Girl myself, I was well pissed off when I read the official definition of my breed, printed without apology in all Collins English dictionaries back in 2012:

Essex Girl (noun): a young working-class woman from the Essex area, typically considered as being unintelligent, materialistic, devoid of taste, and sexually promiscuous

I know we’re hardly living in an equal society (hello, gender pay gap), but blithely making such a sweepingly sexist statement, to be distributed to all corners of the globe as the official word on women born in a certain county, was surely a step too far.

So three cheers and a pat on the back for the “I am an Essex Girl” campaign, which aims to reclaim the term and get it officially removed from the dictionary (for those wondering, Essex Girl is also defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a type of young woman, supposedly to be found in and around Essex, and variously characterised as unintelligent, promiscuous, and materialistic”).

“Why I'm joining thousands of women petitioning to remove Essex Girl from the dictionary”