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A person’s age no longer tells you anything about his or her social position, marriage or health. There’s no longer a particular year in which one goes to school or goes to work or gets married or starts a family. The social clock that keeps us on time and tells us when to go to school, get a job, or stop working isn’t as strong as it used to be. It doesn’t surprise us to hear of a 29-year-old university president or a 35-year-old grandmother, or a 70-year-old man who has become a father for the first time. Public ideas are changing. We’ve stopped looking with surprise at older people who act in youthful ways.

You may ask, is all this concern about sexism in language really important? Aren’t there more serious issues facing women today? Of course, there are many serious issues facing women. I mean, there are so many that I could mention; the AIDS crisis, workplace inequality, the way the mass media treats women, that is, the way they stereotype women, and so on. But I’d like to point out that in addition to these issues, the language question is also on the minds of international organizations such as the United Nations, who try very hard to avoid sexism in their publications. The issue isn’t just the words themselves, but the ideas behind the words.