Word Use Grumble

[forestofglory]

So I know this makes me a bad linguist descriptivist but it bothers me when people use the work "diverse" to refer to individuals rather than groups. Diversity is a property of groups not of individuals! My preferred phrase for what I think people mean when they call an individual "diverse" is "under represented." That is lot chunkier than "diverse" so I expect people will just keep using "diverse" and I'll have to put up with it.

Comments

[monksandbones]

I have a similar complaint about the use of the word "multicultural," which for me as a Canadian, can only be used on a collective level for multicultural groups - ie groups made up of people of various cultures. An individual could, in theory, be multicultural if they had parents from two cultures or had grown up in several cultures, but being a member of a minority/underrepresented group, or even a single minority/underrepresented group, to my mind doesn't make either the person or the group multicultural in and of themselves. But I definitely get the sense that "multicultural" is used as a synonym for "underrepresented" quite often in the US (for example, in the expression "multicultural education," which as far as I can tell refers to education that discusses the history/experiences of underrepresented groups).

[jack]

*hugs* I think it's still ok to have preferences even if you're a linguist or descriptivist. Physicists don't pretend to decide physics, merely to observe it, but I think they still say "I don't like this law, I wish it was otherwise."

With "diverse", I think the evolution of the language is natural (even if I also liked sticking to the traditional definition), but I think there's a bigger problem, that it exposes the natural-but-problematic assumption that "groups of people we're already familiar with are 'normal', others are 'diverse'" :(