We settled it through a column called Aunt Sally in a Sydney newspaper.

I wondered why a metropolitan newspaper would call a column Aunt Sally. Sally was a perfectly respectable name and I knew several people called Sally, not all respectable.

A few hundred years ago, William Shakespeare came up with his definition of an aunt, and I don’t think he was trying to be complimentary. Shakespeare defined an aunt as “an old woman, a gossip”.

Other authors went one better, describing an aunt as “a prostitute”. Webster’s Dictionary has four definitions of an aunt, one being “an old woman and a gossip” and the fourth being “a prostitute”.

Those of my generation would regard an aunt as the sister of our father or mother, or the wife of our uncle. But it wasn’t always so.

The earliest use of aunt that I could find came in 1297, when the word was spelt aunte. It also was spelt for a while as naunt, from the expression “my naunt”.

Many words of that era lost their “n” over the years.

Captain Grose in his irreverent Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1811, described an aunt as “mine aunt, a bawd or procuress, a title of eminence for the senior dells”.

A dell, according to the same 1811 dictionary, is “a young buxom wench, ripe and prone to venery, etc”. The word etc is my own, because this is a clean family newspaper and I’m in deep enough already.

I wonder if the gossipy and bawdy aunt of years past gave rise to the popular Aunt Sally, a fairground favourite who can still be found in some carnivals.

Aunt Sally became the target for those among us who wanted to throw things. By extension, she became the target for criticism.

I assume the newspaper’s column was for people to throw in criticism and then to get replies.

In recent years, we had other expressions containing the word aunt, from trademarks dating back to the 19th century to characters in the world of literature. Who can forget the British farce Charley’s Aunt?

The BBC and the ABC were at times called Auntie. A comment about the BBC at the time when commercial television started was that the BBC was called auntie because it was “just like one of the family”.

If you are reading this, and you happen to be an aunt, you might like another dictionary definition that says it is a term of respect.

So if you don’t tell anyone anything differently, I won’t either.

lauriebarber.com; lbword@midcoast.com.au