Some thoughts on the use of the term “community” (in general) in this essay:
Political leaders and political organizations find the word useful as it can be both positive and politically correct; deviant or controversial groups apply the label community as an affirmation.
“It’s spun so thin nowadays,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. He says the term has become so trivialized as to be an abuse of language — “If you go online, you’ll see the Campbell’s Soup community, people swapping recipes….
The word “community,” from the Latin communitas, dates back to the 14th century and means “a group of people who share a common interest or experience,” said Jack Chambers, a linguistics professor at the University of Toronto.
“The community is literally the making of some common ground,” he explained. “It’s a sort of self-defining word. If you put a modifier with it — the North Toronto community, the linguistic community — you immediately get a distribution of folks.”
It has retained its original meaning, he said. But it has certainly expanded, which experts attribute largely to globalization and the Internet.
With the advent of the Web, members of various “rare-diseases communities” are able to find someone else in the world who understands their pain. People who make up the hypochondria community find others who validate their fears. Those in the “questioning community” (which has been appropriated as part of the ever expanding term LGBTQ: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender/ Transsexual, Queer/Questioning) can find others who share their sexuality questions.
“Physical location is no longer a constraint,” said Charles Boberg, a McGill University professor who specializes in sociolinguistics. “Local communities are decimated by this process of multiplying non-local allegiances to the point where many of us know the people we communicate with on the Internet better than we know who we live next door to.”
The positive side of all this is that people are able to choose the community they would like to join, which can be a liberating experience, said Prof. Boberg.
