Community of communities

Great piece by the Post's Melissa Leong on the annoying proliferation of "community" as the unspeakably polite label for every conceivable trait, hobby, ethnicity etc.

So it is that there is now the clubbing community, the composting community, the conspiracy theorists community; and online, people form the "diaper-lover community" (often associated with the "adult baby community"), the fans of MacGyver community and the cigar aficionado community; and there would be 1.2 million hits on Google for the seemingly nonsensical phrase, "world community."

In the past week alone, the CBC has used the phrase "sex-trade community" in its coverage of the trial of Robert Pickton, the Toronto Police Services announced it was launching an educational campaign targeting the "questioning community" (as distinct from the gay, lesbian, transgender communities), and the Globe and Mail, in a story about men who copulate with horses, referred to the animal-sex community -- without any sense of irony or even the use of quotation marks or italics. The National Post has written stories citing the "education community" and the "investment banking community."

It's a form of euphemism by circumlocution: by taking a longer time to say it, we think we're showing more respect. Call someone a "Jew," and you are plagued by self-doubt: doesn't it sound a little anti-Semitic? Call him a "member of the Jewish community," and you are on unassailably respectful grounds.

It's nonsense, of course -- mush-mouthed, cloying, and most often inaccurate: there is no "composting community," in any meaningful sense of the word. It asserts a commonality and sense of identity that exists only in the minds of activists for various causes and the toadying journalists who oblige them.