Bad Language

    I paused when my New York Times advised me of it.  A prominent businessman had fatally brained himself falling off a treadmill. The incident, my Times informed me from its very front page, had sent a shiver of concern through "the fitness community."
    Now, the regulars at my own gym might charitably be called a diverse bunch.  We have middle-aged wheezers who aren't as fit as they imagine they used to be. We have desk-bound office workers laboring to contain their waistlines. We have oldsters trying to preserve enough flexibility to reach into  the far depths of the liquor cabinet. And we have a sprinkling of impossibly buff youngsters who dart and glide among the rest of us as if we were statues.
    I daresay that we are reasonably typical gym folk.  And I would never have foreseen these motley groups being called a community.  Beneath my notice, the steady creep of English usage had established a new frontier.  This was the real nugget of news in the Times article. For those of us who hadn't been paying attention, with it were implied new defining questions.
    Question One: In this new vocabulary, what constitutes a community?  Can it be any area of shared interest? Several of my friends especially enjoy hummus. Are they a hummus community? Would voyeurs now be called the peeping community? Gossips the dishing community?
    Or perhaps the test is one of size. Must a group reach a certain critical mass to be eligible for community status?
    An excursion through the world of collective nouns was not helpful on the point.  Mathematicians, apparently with time on their hands, have coined a host of words for numbers of special size.  One whopper, for example, is called a googolplexplexplexminex. As the numbers themselves are impossible to comprehend, the utility of these terms escapes me.
    Traditional usage offers a variety of terms for groups of animals. Notable among them, through some sources, is "a congress of baboons."  Other sources dispute this as bogus lexicography. Still others reject it as a slander upon baboons.  Absent authoritative ruling, we seem to be free to arrive at our own opinions.
    Groups of human beings seemed a likelier focus. There we find troupes, teams, squads, slates, arrays and congregations.  One source quite seriously lists a melody of harpists, a pint of Irishmen and an explosion of Italians.
    My research failed, however, to find parameters for the latest concepts of community. Apparently any group  larger than two may be so-called. This does present possibilities of a sort. People who text while driving might be deemed the fathead community.  Telemarketers would be members of the pest community.
    But this kind of freewheeling usage robs language of essential meaning and moves it into the hands of -- well, the jargon community. And come to think of it, I guess people given to this particular form of jargon could be called the community community.
    Which is enough said. It's making me a member of the grumpy community.  Perhaps I'll find allies at the gym, if I can interest some folks who are not too winded to discuss it.