Hovering in the background, as observers note the introduction of new vocabulary and note the changes in vocabulary’s style and popularity, is the linguistic distinction between prescriptive and descriptive definitions. The old and endless debate about the interplay between these two types of definitions comes to the fore as words are used, misused, and abused.
In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, one example is the word ‘community.’ For much of the twentieth century, this word, both prescriptively and descriptively, was in most cases understood to refer to a group of people who knew and interacted with each other on a frequent and regular basis: a small town or a neighborhood being the prime examples.
A change occurred when the word began to be applied to groups which were organized for the purpose of creating political or social pressure. These are social action groups or lobbying groups.
The next step was to apply this word to the people, usually cast as victims, whom the pressure groups allegedly represented. The news media reported on activists speaking about the “Black community” or the “African-American community.” In this way, the word came to refer to people who’d never met, and who were not even aware of each other’s existence. A 75-year-old multi-millionaire in Massachusetts and a 25-year-old receptionist at a dental practice in Los Angeles were thus part of the same “community.”
The semantic field of the word was stretched and distorted.
Marketing analysts began using phrases like “the wristwatch community” and “the mechanical pencil community.”
The word had come to be applied to large numbers of people who shared only one variable, and who had no knowledge of, or acquaintance with, each other: people who might be different from each other in many significant ways.
What is the effect arising from this change in a word’s usage? Why did this change come about? To speak of the “fountain pen community” — a subset of the “analog writing community” — is to attribute to the group a quality beyond the mere fact that all members share one common variable. The connotation or feel of the word is that these people share an identity and sense of belonging. The people who use these phrases don’t say that explicitly, and probably don’t even believe it; yet they use the phrase to create an impression in the mind of the reader or hearer: an impression that these people somehow are united.
The reader will consider the subtle difference between ‘Black people are … ’ and ‘the Black community is … ’ at the beginning of a sentence.
But, as in the earlier example, these people have only one variable in common, and that is a weak argument for alleging a sense of community among them. They have never met or communicated with each other, vote differently, worship differently, hold different moral standards, speak different languages, live and shop and play in different contexts, and have different educations and family structures. This is a “community” only if the definition of ‘community’ has been significantly changed.
It might be more accurate to speak of the “Black population” or the “Black demographic segment” in most situations. But it might lack the emotion and might fail to create the mental image in people’s minds — the emotion and image which lobbyists or activists find useful in promoting their causes.
Yet the organic growth of natural languages is inexorable, and won’t be contained, like Frankenstein’s monster, even by those who created such usages. Once the runaway use of the word ‘community’ started, it could not be stopped.
Which leads us to a November 2025 article in the Michigan Daily about a manicurist who posted photos of her work on social media: the article’s title included the phrase: “The Online Nail Community.”
