WHEN I first worked for newspapers and the Associated Press in New Hampshire in the 1970s, there was an interlude when the accepted style was: Ms. Smith (who prefers that designation)... Ive since told many disbelieving students about this bumpy construction. I use it to make the point that language drives change, and while the getting-there is usually awkward, the arrival is worth it.

I think of this getting-to-Ms. process when I read opinions along the lines of the New Hampshire Sunday News editorial, Wokefulness: A colony by any other name (7/12), which criticizes a decision by the board of the MacDowell Colony, the renowned writers retreat in Peterborough, to drop Colony from its name. The reasoning, according to the board member quoted, is that colony can convey a sense of hierarchy and exclusion.

There are two sets of reasons to shift our language. There are those official changes we need to make because the terms are already widely understood to be outdated and offensive a team called the Redskins, for example. And there are those cases in which we change because the language is one immediate way that all of us can model respect and point to where we want to go in the future.

Adding Ms. to the title-choice list and shoving girl offstage in favor of woman for adult females were signs of such respect. The changes did not sweep away sexism, but were among the many small, important steps taken to move away from systemic gender discrimination of the workplace and beyond. The colony change falls into this category.

This language-tidying work feels to some like reactive political correctness, and they cant say the new phrases without rolling their eyes. In the 90s I had a newsroom colleague who always mimed quotation marks when using the term person of color in conversation. (This stopped when irritated young reporters began making the same air quotes whenever they described a person as white or elderly or dead.)

I often hear folks decry language police or insist Im too old to change. Yes, it takes time to unlearn the muscle memory of language. As a person who has spent most of my life wrangling words and whacking my way through weedy paragraphs in search of clarity, I too still stumble over language changes.

But opting out of this evolution is, at the very least, lazy. Worse, such recalcitrance adds to the fissures in our society that widen and split open.

The editorial opines that the real problem with MacDowells decision is not the word in question, but with people trying to out-do each other in wearing their linguistic sensitivity or wokefulness on their sleeves. That misses the point. The MacDowell decision is an effort to be respectful, to move away as the sun sets on an old empire and its class and racial divisions. As with every other shift toward more thoughtful language, it is a small apology that other, bigger changes are overdue.

Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett is an author and editor in Manchester.

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Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett: MacDowell rebranding is about respect - The Union Leader