What seems to gall some people about the new singular “they” is that people are requesting to be addressed in a novel way that feels counterintuitive to many. But then just some decades ago, some will remember how disorienting it could be to adapt to using Ms. rather than delineating women as married or unmarried on the basis of Mrs. and Miss. Now that custom can look somewhere between coarse and hilarious (think of the “Schitt’s Creek” scene where Roland deceptively introduces Stevie as “Miss Felmington”).

I remember how it felt to be an English speaker in the late 1980s when seemingly overnight, one was to say Asian rather than Oriental, Latino rather than Hispanic, and shortly thereafter, African American rather than Black, with Oriental, especially, considered from then on offensive (while Black has made a return as an adjective). And yet the earth kept spinning, and references to “Orientals” are now as antique as Atari and McDonald’s hamburgers in Styrofoam boxes.

Because pronouns are used so much, it’s easy to think that the way they are at a given time is the way pronouns are supposed to be. But there is a language in New Guinea called Berik in which there is one pronoun for second person; one pronoun that means “he,” “she,” “it” and “they”; and only in the first person is there a difference between “I” and “we.” They manage quite well.