What to call Paul Wolfowitz's special lady friend.

By Ben Yagoda - Slate Magazine:

At this point, my best guess is that the [term] "girlfriend" that made its way into this week's Times article was a slip. As the [NYT] style guide sniffs about girlfriend and boyfriend, 'The terms are informal and best reserved for teenagers.' The very next day the paper went back to companion. But who knows? Maybe this is the forward flank of a semantic shift. The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation of girlfriend to refer to a romantic partner is the 1926 Broadway musical The Girl Friend, which featured a Rodgers and Hart song with the same title. In early feminist days, of course, girl was disparaged as infantilizing, an animus that led to the classic 'Doonesbury' caption, 'It's a baby woman!