The novelist Lionel Shriver was vexed this week about Penguin Random House’s new aim for its authors and staff “to reflect the UK population taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability”. This, Shriver wrote, was a publisher “drunk on virtue”. For good measure, she claimed the word “diversity” had been “effectively removed from the language as a general-purpose noun”. Really?
“Diversity” comes from the Latin for “facing both ways”, and “divers” or “diverse” in English has meant “various” since the 13th century. (Also “several” or “sundry”, and at one time “wicked” or “perverse”.) These days, of course, “diversity” can also mean a variety of ethnic, sexual and other identities.
Shriver’s moan that this modern meaning has erased the old one is rather like regretting that one can no longer use “gay” to mean cheerful or “queer” to mean peculiar. It will come as a surprise, for instance, to the many people who somehow still manage to speak of the diversity of plant and animal species, or a diversity of political views. But then furious people astride hobby horses rarely welcome the linguistic diversity that enriches everyone.
