In recent years, pronouns have become complicated. First, “they” or “their” replaced “he or she” and “his or her”.  I understand why that is convenient. What I have trouble with is the addition of she/her or him/his to email signatures.  Really?

Also lately, I have added gender-related terms to my vocabulary, including cisgender, nonbinary, mx, genderfluid, genderqueer, ze and hir. I suspect we have not heard the last of this.

In other vocabulary news, the word "woke" used to (and still) means the past tense of wake.  However, it now also has a political meaning, “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)” according to Merriam-Webster.

Which leads me to ChatGPT, an amazing, but frightening development that has academics scrambling to figure out how to keep students’ writing original.

The pace of change is a bit frightening. Especially if you are 80-something.