Nearby on the tabletop as I write this lie several pieces of snail mail. A plethora of emails is at the touch of a key. Almost all the business correspondence is addressed to “Lisa” or my given name, “Mary.” Some include my full name, but almost none addresses me as “Mrs.” or “Ms.”

While the option of choosing one’s pronouns – a facet of the cultural changes around gender identification – has captured the American public’s attention, informalizing how we identify and address strangers reflects other dramatic changes that have been hiding in plain sight.

The other day in a Lawrence + Memorial medical office a nurse addressed an older man as “Mr. (Name).” Addressing people by their first names in doctors’ offices is now so routine that her words caught my attention. I told her that, and she replied, “To me it’s a matter of respect.”

I liked that. I recognize that summoning patients into their exams by calling out their first names in the waiting room may conform with the spirit if not the letter of the HIPAA rules, but in the privacy of an examination room the nurse chose what she considered a more respectful, less informal form of address.

I don’t stand on formality, as people used to say when standing on formality was a thing. It makes no self-importance difference to me what the people at Mastercard or Veolia call me. Still, we ought to take notice any time language undergoes wholesale change, because language and usage change when realities change.

The current reality is that the terms in which people first address one another, in writing or aloud, have steadily shifted from the routinely formal to near-universal familiarity. Cause and effect are hard to separate in any culture change, including language, because the change develops over time. Over several decades, the change from how the milkman addressed my mother to the way the postal delivery person addresses me is both a sign of the times and a basis for continued change. Language is a habit until it’s broken.

The honorific “Ms.,” which preserved the use of formal title/surname without reference to a woman’s marital status, signaled a big step in the advancement of feminism in English-speaking countries in 1969, yet it had had to wait for its time to come. Suggestions are on record for use of the term in 1901 and the 1950s, but the culture had not caught up. In 1969 “Ms.” had enough momentum to become the name of a new magazine.

Now, having perhaps accomplished its work, “Ms.” is going the way of “Miss,” “Mr.,” and “Mrs.” People are self-defining in categories that the traditional honorifics can’t cover. Behind the dropping of the terms that once clarified a person’s status is a less homogeneous society and a language that reflects the change by going silent on the titles.

Change may bother people or encourage them, but it is rarely all bad or good. Change is change. As new terms for new or altered phenomena emerge, humans hear them once, mentally register repetitions and meaning, and eventually start using them in their new context: Tweet. LGBTQ. Friend. Follow. Global warming. Kambucha.

The tendency of the human mind to categorize others is built in, however, and if honorifics are useless the mind will find other, less civil ways to sort people.

I try to envision the mob that swarmed the U.S. Capitol in 2021 addressing the people they confronted as “Officer” or “Congresswoman.” I can’t, because as a hostile force they were there to demean and disarm, not debate. For most Americans the Capitol would have been the epitome of formal environments, a place to address public servants respectfully. Instead, invaders were looking for “Pence” and “Nancy.“

In courts, government, finance and economics, the military and diplomacy, people will still address each other as Mr. or Ms. or Mrs. or Miss or by the title of their role: Your Honor, Admiral, Professor, Doctor. Society’s institutions will see to that. Their primary mission is order and continuity, rather than change.

In the messier marketplace of the everyday world, although the change to informality is irrevocable, the critical thing is to keep the discourse civil.

Lisa McGinley is a member of The Day Editorial Board.