Definition of 'vegan' being used

Some of you may notice that the word 'vegan' is being used on this website to simply mean "people who don't eat animal products". A simplified description for why this definition is being used is described on this webpage (there are quite a few definitions of the word 'vegan' that exist but this is one of the main definitions that exists today). If you are familiar with the past activities or ARO and ideas about language that have been presented by Tony Levin through ARO, you will probably realize that Tony Levin has changed a lot regarding how he thinks the word 'vegan' should be used. There are quite a lot of people involved with animal rights related activities that think that the word 'vegan' should be used to refer to more than just 'not eating animal products'. Tony Levin used to agree with this position and thought that the word vegan should be used to refer to something like "people who strive to not contribute to animal exploitation" (which is similar to some definitions promoted by many people involved with animal rights activism).

But the problem is that there are a huge number of people who use the word vegan just to refer to "not eating animal products", and this definition is getting used a lot in newspapers and other media, in many dictionaries (but the dictionaries sometimes contain multiple definitions) and it is also getting used by many major animal rights activist organizations. Also, the word 'vegan' sounds like it just refers to food issues since it sounds so similar to the word vegetarian which sounds similar to the word vegetable. So, Tony Levin has come to realize that it makes sense to flow with the commonly recognized usage of the word vegan, to make communication with people easier.

If you are interested in chatting about the issue of how the word 'vegan' is defined, then you can do this on the ARO forum by joining the ARO forum and writing some messages under the vegan definition topic.