“For some people it may well be homophobia,” Powell told me. “But I think for a large number of people today, with so much social change going on, it’s hard to keep up with what’s appropriate. The question is how to distinguish between the people who mean well but just don’t know what to say, and those who really have a hard time with gay relationships.” It’s a tough distinction indeed. I’m well aware of my bias—a protective, Mama Bear instinct that clouds my thinking about anything affecting the son of mine who happens to be gay (as well as my three straight kids).

I can see the logic in Powell’s theory that language simply needs to catch up to social progress, as it has during other seminal moments in history. After all, I experienced my own evolution of sorts, learning over many months how to weave my son’s sexual orientation into casual conversations on sports sidelines or at Scout socials. By now, though, just about everyone I know more than in passing is aware my oldest son is gay. Closer connections—including all the “friend” brandishers—know he’s got a boyfriend, a fiercely intelligent musician who can whip up a gourmet meal like nobody’s business (and lovingly transform my kitchen into an aromatic wreck in the process).

But while my gaydar may be lacking (I didn’t know for certain that Sean was gay until he came out to me at age 16), I can usually tell from these everyday exchanges who isn’t ready to hear about my son’s boyfriend as comfortably as they are, for instance, to hear about my daughter’s. After years of fits and starts, the staggering pace of progress in LGBT rights has made it a lot easier to sniff out those hiding behind a façade of gay acceptance in polite company. Even before Friday’s Supreme Court ruling, 37 states had legalized same-sex marriage over the last 11 years, and a new Gallup poll indicates a record 60 percent of Americans now support marriage equality.

Powell has witnessed this evolution firsthand in the years since his research began. In 2003, he noticed that when many of those he interviewed said the words “gay,” “lesbian” or “homosexual,” they used a verbal filler like “um” before the word or even lowered their voices, “not unlike when I was growing up,” he recalled, “and my mother said the word ‘cancer.’” By 2010, study participants had all but ceased these verbal tics. “The change we’ve seen over the last dozen or so years,” he posited, “is a result of a combination of factors: a very strong social movement; a very effective legal campaign; changes in the media; and open discussions in households and workplaces about these issues.”

But this sea change—and its effects on the language surrounding gay rights—hasn’t even caught up with everyone in the trenches. Powell himself has gay friends who won’t refer to themselves as husband and husband or wife and wife, if only because they hadn’t heard others like themselves referring to their spouses this way in the past. “People’s use of language is very much shaped by the language they used while they were coming of age,” Powell said. “Words are hard to get used to.”