Typos bother me — a lot. But there are worse things.

You don’t have to be a professional writer to be a stickler for the grammar that used to be called “correct” or “proper,” but that now goes by the much less judgmental moniker “normative.”

“Normative” suggests that there’s nothing inherently better about the grammar we were taught in school; rather, it’s simply the winner of a kind of linguistic popularity contest. And a rigged contest, at that, since the rules tend to be written by the privileged classes, and then used as a kind of social litmus for determining who belongs, and who doesn’t.

Homophones — i.e., words that sound alike but are spelled differently and have different meanings — present a particularly interesting case. The distinction between “knight” and “night,” for instance, or “you’re” and “your,” only emerges when the words are written, a fact that could lead one to ask, “Why should we care so much about spelling, when the meaning is clear from the context? Message sent; message received. Isn’t that the whole point of language?”

Here’s another example: I’m not going to stop you in the middle of a spoken sentence to clarify whether you meant “sleight” or “slight” when you said, “I was slighted.” I know you meant “slighted.” It wouldn’t have made any sense to say, “I was sleighted.”

But it makes a big difference in print. Which is why, last week, when I saw that the wrong version of “slighted” had managed to squeak past the internal grammar Nazi of one of my favorite columnists, David Brooks, and then to evade the eagle eyes of the typically superb editors of the New York Times, I was galvanized into action. It bothered me that Mr. Brooks had used the wrong word. I took it personally. That one tiny error became the focus of the entire column. This was the New York Times, our nation’s unofficial newspaper of record, one of the last standard-bearers of American English in a world rapidly devolving into text-messagedom!

A friendly letter to the editors of the paper was all it took. The error was corrected in a matter of hours, and all was once again peaceful in the land.

My daughter was amused when I told her the story of my adventures in crowd-sourced proofreading. “It’s important!” I said, when she flashed an indulgent smile, the one that says: “Papa, this is kind of funny, and maybe even borderline charming, but you might want to keep it, uh, mostly to yourself?”

And, in fact, that very night, Nina and I got into a heated discussion about the power of words, and who has the right to police them. She told me about a movement to use the pronoun “they” to describe an individual, transgendered or otherwise, who prefers not to identify as either a male or a female.

“Wait,” I said, “you mean that instead of saying, ‘She showed up for class,’ or ‘He showed up for class,’ I’d now be required to say, ‘They showed up for class?’”

“Exactly,” she said.

“And the ‘they’ is just one person?”

“Right.”

“But…but…” I sputtered, “that’s wrong! You can’t use ‘they’ to describe an individual.”

“You can if it’s what ‘they’ want, if that’s how ‘they’ think of ‘themselves.’”

There followed about thirty minutes of paternal fulmination, which was matched by an equally determined adolescent digging-in-of-the-heels.

(The next day, I was informed that I’d been a “little bit of a jerk.” Only a slightly saltier word was substituted for “jerk.”)

The issue made a bit more sense in the light of day. Language has a way of lagging behind social change, of being both a political football and a historical embarrassment. Just look at the tortured progress of the way we refer to people of color — “people of color” merely being the latest in a long line of euphemisms, some of them less savory than others.

The problem is particularly acute for individuals who don’t feel either like a “he” or a “she.” Unfortunately for them, English isn’t a language with a gender-neutral pronoun, unlike, say Chinese, where one can simply refer to a “unit of person.”

Other countries are facing this issue head-on. Last month, India’s supreme court affirmed the right of citizens to identify themselves as a “third gender” on official documents.

Look out for more public dialogue — and controversy — about the so-called “gender spectrum” in the future. And keep your eyes peeled for the linguistic skirmishes that will go hand in hand with the transgender movement, since language is at the very root of identity politics.

I’m all for people having the right to call themselves whatever they please; just don’t ask me to like the sound of, “They is getting married to them.”