Sometimes cultural shifts rumble at a glacial pace. Sometimes they gather momentum so quickly that our language can only surge ahead in an effort to catch up. Think selfie, or vape, or normcore.

Next up may be Mx. (pronounced mix), a gender-neutral alternative to Ms. and Mr.

Online discussion of Mx. grew clamorous in the last month after an array of media outlets reported with more excitement than hard facts that editors of the prestigious Oxford English Dictionary had announced its consideration to add the Mx. title.

Like so many pebbles of cultural news that ripple across the Internet, that one was only sort of accurate. The actual story is a bit less dramatic: A representative of the Oxford University Press, which publishes a range of periodicals, including the OED, was contacted by someone asking whether Mx. might be added to the mix. The answer was yes, it is being considered by one of the publisher’s online lexicons, OxfordDictionaries.com.

But the fervor with which the cultural discussion grew underscored perhaps a greater truth: Swaths of Americans are comfortable with new considerations of gender and of the importance (or lack thereof) of identifying a specific gender, and they would welcome new words to help communicate in a new world.