We are family -- enough already

Ruth Walker, one of my favorite bloggers and commenters on the language at the Christian Science Monitor's "Verbal Energy," had a couple of good posts during the holidays that I'm catching up on.

Her thoughts about the word community -- a word I would argue is vastly overused -- are worth musing: Do we seem to overuse it because we fear we do not have enough of it?

And her latest post deals with the evolution of our language -- specifically how the term condescending has come to mean something totally different than in George Washington's time. As she notes, patronizing and the idiom of saying someone is on his or her "high horse" have a similarly "mixed background."