Spinster focused on a single lost love, destined to go unmarried unless the lover returns. Tina Fey's portrayal of her character Liz Lemon, on the hit NBC series "30 Rock", exemplifies another classic spinster stereotype. Lemon, a 40-something single woman whose relationships never seem to work out, has unrealistically high expectations for a male partner: her dream husband is the archetypal "Astronaut Mike Dexter", and for much of the series her character is holding out on settling on a man until she can score an astronaut. Unpopped popcorn kernels have been dubbed "old maids" in popular slang, since like unmarried women
Spinster old maid? How dare you, then, pervert the most sacred institution of the Almighty, by becoming the wife of a man for whom you can feel no emotions of love, or respect even?" In the lexicon of English, the word mistress is similar to 'spinster', in that it also has no exact male counterpart. The "Oxford American English Dictionary" defines spinster as "an unmarried woman, typically an older woman beyond the usual age for marriage". It adds: "In modern everyday English, however, spinster cannot be used to mean simply ‘unmarried woman’; as such, it is a derogatory term, referring or