Language is a container for thought that shapes the contents. The great revelation of Einstein’s relativity was that spacetime — the fabric of the universe — tells matter how to move and matter tells spacetime how to bend. Language is the fabric of culture. Language tells thinking how to move and thought tells language how to bend. Because we live in language, because our very personhood is a narrative creation, even the greatest visionaries can never fully bend their gaze past the event horizon of their culture’s language: its lexicon and parlance, its idioms and metaphors. For most of human history, most human rights have been reserved for men — the right to property, the right to vote, the right to cultivate the full extent of one’s talents, to enter a library or a bathhouse, to leave an unhappy marriage. It is difficult to fault those born in such a world for tasking the male pronoun with holding the universal despite the myriad different ways of being human. (Count on Ursula K. Le Guin to make a brilliant farce of the fault.) For all the mistakes they made on the loom, our ancestors still wove the culture of today into being, the culture out of which arise the very judgments with which we judge them. To me, trying to update their language — like all well-intentioned but puerile efforts to revise yesterday with the standards of today — is a version of the Grandfather Paradox. We change the future by changing the present, not the past.