I have been alarmed to watch the way the word “community” has been used to fabricate groups that don’t seem to have any geographical or social or ideological group coherence. In conservative thinking, the word “community” is as important as any save “tradition.” It’s the concept undergirding federalism, family values in the truest sense, and the “communitarian” impulse to let people run their own affairs. Unfortunately “community” is so badly abused these days in public language that it is probably time to accept that it just needs to be junked.
Perhaps the most common usage we hear in politics is the amorphous “black community.” Also popular is the “intelligence community.” Perhaps this is in deference to a better organized information-sharing apparatus post-9/11, and America’s many intelligence agency employees may in fact commune more than they once did. But I even heard a reference, this week, to a belief held by the Iranian “intelligence community.” Iran can do some sophisticated spying, but surely this is pushing it.
Once a bit of language takes sufficient hold, it spreads. If it’s an inventive and colorful bit of language, that’s all to the good; English grows more vivid and expressive. But if it’s a muddying bit of language, and users of language don’t think very hard about what they’re hearing, it’s a virulent process.
Take, also, the “LGBTQ+ community,” which presents all sorts of other problems. First, that the Q and the + seem at least largely redundant with the LGB, but also that the Ts are people who are different from the norm by way of gender, and the rest are by sexuality. Seems a slapdash way to categorize people, and indeed the category is meaningless except for the purposes of sloppy rhetorical shortcuts. Using this word allows you to answer fewer questions, not communicate more information.
Finally, and worst, there are references to “community” without any modifiers at all. See bald references to “our communities” and “community action” and the “community level” and such, which are the equivalent verbal effect of putting “people’s” before every noun in the apparatus of a communist government — political connotation without any meaning whatever. They let you know you’re supposed to approve, but not why.
This is not what we mean when we use(d) the word correctly, as in “community health centers.” Those concrete things serve, literally, the people around them, groups of people within a local area connected by social and civic bonds. The new usage of “community” represents a slippery way to assert groups of people who never really grouped up. It makes the listener imagine an avatar of some type of sympathetic person, rather than actually listening to people. And real people tend not to be easily represented by avatars, because one of the things about communities is that they are made up of different people with different views and interests and concerns.
Unfortunately, what makes it so frustrating is also what makes it too useful to be likely to go away. Despite the strident opposition from the language-columnist community.
—By Nicholas Clairmont
