This posting is mostly about my personal life, but there is a (small) linguistic point. If you don’t want to read about my personal life, bow out after the preliminaries are over.
It starts with a Zits cartoon from last month:
Jeremy’s parents are on diets — low-fat and high-fiber and probably more — and I sympathize. I’ll explain, but first a few comments on the word diet.
In modern English this has two principal meanings (there are others), an older one and a more recent one that’s a specialization of the older sense. NOAD2 glosses them:
[older] the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats
[specialized] a special course of food to which one restricts oneself, either to lose weight or for medical reasons
Compare “Kim’s diet is low in fat” [sense 1] with “Kim’s diet allows only a few grams of fat a day” [sense 2]. In sense 2, a diet serves a purpose other than providing simple nutrition or sensual pleasure; it’s treatment rather than just food — a fact that has led many critics (Michael Pollan, for instance) to criticize diets-2, sometimes passionately.
Here end the preliminaries.