Roughly 12 years ago, when I was still teaching, I noticed a young woman with a sticker on her laptop that read, "Ask me about pronouns." So I did.

She seemed a bit uncomfortable talking to someone she knew only as her teacher about a topic she assumed I would not really understand, but she bravely went ahead and give me the gist. It was my first introduction to the push by a generation of kids to have some control over how they were addressed. Beyond the usual, "Hi. Robert. But please, call me Bob" kind of thing.

The 'kind of thing' they wanted addressed had to do with gender, which of course got a lot of people upset and continues to do so today. And in so doing, they put their collective finger on the magic and some of the frustrations of language. Among these, its power, its limitations and who gets a say, much less control, over the social contract of its use.

I thought about this when I pondered whether or not to call one of my galleries here 'Tao' or 'Dao.' Relative to the pronoun issue, it's a small thing with none of the personal or political importance, but it occurred to me that the latter spelling's introduction into the English language, and its subsequent adoption, follows a similar pattern.

Someone, somewhere, made the decision, in this case, that the sound a D makes was closer to the authentic spoken word in Chinese than that of a T. (In truth, I believe it's somewhere in between, but I don't speak Chinese, so this is definitely a secondhand opinion.) That led to alternate spellings of the volume, from Tao te Ching to Dao DeJing, or even Daodejing. And from Lao Tsu to Lao tzu to Laozi. There's a nice entry on this at taoistic.com here.

I eventually settled on the more "traditional" spelling because that's how it was spelled when I first was introduced to this philosophy/religion, and because no one from the Taoist community, as far as I know, has come forth and asked us English speakers to please change the spelling. If a Chinese speaker could show me how the new versions are more accurate, that might be enough to change my mind as well. But for now, the majority still write it as Tao, so without compelling reason to change, I'll stay here for now. (Full disclosure: one email address I have had for a long time contains the word, "Daoist," so I make no claim to consistency.)

People, on the other hand, would seem to have a right to be called as they wish (see Robert and Bob, above) and it feels to me a small thing to refer to someone as 'they' rather than as 'he' or 'she.' It costs very little and is a small token of respect for that person's right to define themselves as they wish.

Language, like us (we hope), evolves, and like a murmuration of starlings, no one individual is in charge. But we keep up and the sweep and movement of the flight is mesmerizing and beautiful.

And of course, this is true for the language of photography, as it moves from the early days of silver plates to black and white film, to color, to digital and now on to AI-assisted image creation. Each transition had and has its champions and its detractors, but our human murmuration (can't resist that word, really) has found, and will find, its own particular flightpath. And like Taoist v Daoist, I'm not 100% certain which side I alight on the issue of AI in images, but I know one thing for certain: it will change. We will change, our language will change, and because our language will change, so will our thoughts and feeling towards the things and ideas we speak of.