If you’ve been around as long as I have, you’re old enough to have experienced a fascinating series of changes regarding accepted terminology to describe black people in America.

At the time of my birth in the early ‘60s — in a part of Florida so Southern and country, my grandfather often told me he was 20 years old before he knew you could say “yankee” without putting “damn” in front of it — black people were still commonly referred to as “colored.”

The reasons for that were not entirely racist; “colored people” account for the final two initials in the acronym for one of black America’s oldest and finest institutions, the NAACP, and colored was a clear step away from a recent past in which the public discourse was filled with toxic, emotionally loaded descriptors.

But much more often, colored was a dehumanizing pejorative, used commonly, for instance, in signs meant to keep black people from drinking from water fountains only to be used by whites. Other signs and the policies behind them stung even harder in their bigoted finality: “No Coloreds Allowed.”

For a relatively brief time as the Civil Rights movement played out in the 1960s, “colored” was jettisoned for “negro,” which notably appears in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. But it didn’t last. As I moved into elementary school, “black” moved into our language as the dominant descriptor, though the politically forward were already down with “Afro-American” and, a bit later, “African-American” — seven syllables heavily and thankfully used in today’s parlance, despite their unwieldiness compared to the monosyllabic “black.”

Language is like that. Ever evolving, shifting consonants and vowels into sound and meaning that, hopefully, more accurately reflect reality and cultural norms. Or in the case of our descriptors of people and things, a more nuanced and finely drawn articulation of what they are and what they are not.

U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono gets that. Earlier this month, she teamed up with Rep. Grace Meng to successfully steer a resolution through Congress, including unanimous passage in the Senate, to remove from federal law all uses of the so-dated-it-smells-like-old-mothballs term, “Oriental.”

The word has been recognized for several decades by linguists, historians and Asian-American advocates as racially loaded, demeaning and insulting. After President Obama adds his expected signature to the resolution, Oriental will begin its overdue disappearing act from the federal record.

It will follow other phrasing that has also thankfully gone away. News outlets no longer refer to gay men as “perverts,” for instance — a word commonly used in headlines and body copy as recently as the 1950s. Likewise, the terms “female impersonator” and “transvestite” have been jettisoned in reference to actual transgender women and girls.

Last week, Civil Beat was asked to change its phrasing on yet another matter. Advocates for the practice of allowing physicians to prescribe medicine to terminally ill patients who ask for it now much prefer the phrase “medical aid in dying” to the older and terribly loaded, “physician-assisted suicide.”

For some (including me), this makes perfect sense. Medical aid in dying only resembles suicide in that the final act involves a person ending his/her life.

Suicide, however, typically involves physically healthy people suffering from depression or some other form of mental distress who choose to take their lives in secrecy, without consultation or approval from physicians, family or friends. It’s usually an act of desperation — one considered taboo in our society.

Medical aid in dying is different in all of those ways from suicide. In the states that permit it, each statutorily differentiate it from suicide, and insurance companies don’t penalize the insured or their survivors who take advantage of those laws.

And as a phrase, it carries the added benefit of accuracy honed over time. We wouldn’t call capital punishment “state facilitated murder,” nor would we think of using “involuntary sex” interchangeably with rape, even though some might argue both are technically accurate. Likewise, medical aid in dying isn’t suicide, at least from my point of view.

But the jury is still out on this one. It touched off a lively debate among our editors and reporters, all of whom will be guided in this as we are in other similar matters — by current Associated Press style:

“Medically assisted suicide is permitted in some states and countries. Advocacy groups call it death with dignity, but AP doesn’t use that phrase on its own. When referring to legislation whose name includes death with dignity or similar terms, just say the law allows the terminally ill to end their own lives unless the name itself of the legislation is at issue.”

At stake here, as in other terminology changes, is acceptance into dominant culture and inclusion in the American mainstream. One struggles to imagine, for instance, whether “marriage equality” could have achieved such widespread use if use of the word “pervert” (and other, even less charitable phrasing) hadn’t first been shown the door.

One can often gauge the point of view of policymakers or advocates on subjects like institutional racism and racial profiling by the sensitivity employed around use of “African-American” and the modernity of other phrasing around such debates.

As accepted language changes, what represents progress for some equals an exasperating waste of time for others.

No small part of Donald Trump’s appeal to a certain sizable segment of older white voters, for instance, is his eagerness to “tell it like it is” and his impatience with “political correctness.” For such voters, calling Mexican immigrants drug dealers and rapists or advocating for all Muslims to be banned from entering the United States isn’t bigotry, just plainspoken honesty.

“Trump has been running against ‘political correctness,’” reads part of a February story in The Atlantic that focused on the presidential candidate’s exploitation of “popular anger against the policing of ordinary conversation.”

Perhaps. While it’s easy to lampoon, consideration of new and emerging terminology that challenges older beliefs and standards is rarely a bad thing for our public discourse. Though it’s commonly driven by advocates seeking to reset the dialogue on a specific idea or create a place at the table for those denied full participation in American life, those are hardly reasons to discount the merits of linguistic change.

As to whether “medical aid in dying” will follow “African-American” or “marriage equality” into our common lexicon or “Oriental” into the wastebin of words found lacking, it may be too early to tell. But the fact that advocates, journalists, policymakers and others are having serious discussions about this phrasing underscores a point on which we all can agree and of which we should never lose sight.

Words matter.