Etymology is not use. Use defines language.

The "Vegan society" of mid-20th century is an insignificant part of the history of vegan ideas. It's just where the term originated in the US as a standalone term.

Millions of peoples call themselves vegans, and have adopted this or that part of veganism (or even just vegeterianism) without having ever heard about the Vegan Society and its founders.

The definition of the term doesn't belong, copyright style, to those that coined them, but to how it evolved in language by those that use it.

The dictionary itself captures that use, and doesn't care about how people originally defined the term in some office:

"vegan: a strict vegetarian who consumes no food (such as meat, eggs, or dairy products) that comes from animals"

Like how surrealism as a term is not defined by what Andre Breton wrote in some official documents the 20s and 30s.

It's kind of like the term hacker. The general public understands it to mean one thing, but vast majority of people who apply the term to themselves understand it to mean another thing.

You can doubt it, but you'd be wrong. At best they'd chanced about some historical background piece that contained the definition. But the huge majority wont tie it to some 19th century "Vegan Society" or know/remember anything about some "original definition".

>It's kind of like the term hacker. The general public understands it to mean one thing, but vast majority of people who apply the term to themselves understand it to mean another thing.

Well, the latter are wrong in your sense (etymology, history) too. There are references to the term "hacker" to mean intruder on other systems from decades before people self-identified and pushed for the supposedly benign-only definition. (E.g. there are reports of "hackers" messing with telephone services and bringing them down as far back as the early sixties (literally mentioned as "hackers", not phreakers).

Do you have any evidence for that claim? All the vegans I know use this definition.

Also, the vegan society was started in the 20th century.

You shouldn't leave out the egg part.

But yes, terms change. I've read early Vegan Society texts where they talk about "fruitarians" as those vegetarians that only eat the fruits produced by animals, i.e. milk, egg, honey. Today a fruitarian is a vegetarian that only eats fruits (and sometimes nuts and seeds) that you can pick without killing the plant.

There are also different opinions on the term vegetarian. In Sweden, it commonly includes milk and egg, and if you order a vegetarian pizza you get cheese from cow milk. But the Swedish National Food Agency, and other agencies like the Consumer Agency, define a product marked "vegetarian" as being strictly vegetable based. The last couple of years, soy hot dog manufacturers have been forced to add "lacto vegetarian" or "ovo vegetarian" to their packages.

So it's nothing strange to have different points of view of what exactly is denoted by the terms vegetarian and vegan.

I think this is part of the same definition issue. The sentence I quoted as an example doesn’t make it clear whether or not Watson intended for their choice of not eating eggs to be a personal one or one included in the definition of veganism. Certainly if someone told me they were non-dairy vegetarian I think I wouldn’t assume that they eat eggs (or assume that they definitely don’t eat eggs). I think I would err on the side of non-eggs despite that that would be the sameish as veganism. Perhaps everyone else disagrees with me and the phrase has a clear definition, but otherwise I think it shows that a lot of these terms are not fully defined and different people take them to mean different things when describing themselves.

Rereading the sentence again I think perhaps I parsed it wrong, in which case I agree with you.

In My Big Fat Greek Wedding there's a scene were the mother-in-law learns the groom is vegetarian and (after exclaiming embarrassingly loudly) she says she'll cook him lamb:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFemw_6a-Tg

The way I understand this is that it says that Greeks think that lamb is vegetarian as in "not really meat". I always found that a little weird, because in Greece lamb is absolutely "meat". Traditionally, you're only supposed to eat it on Easter sunday, or on religious feasts (the "panygiria") so it's really something special, unlike pulses, legumes and fish (which would be eaten much more commonly traditionally). I can imagine a Greek yiayia saying "You're vegetarian? That's OK, I'll cook you chicken!", or adding feta to the salad, etc. But- lamb? I don't quite see that.

Maybe it's a Greek US diaspora thing, but I'm guessing that was translated for the American audience whom the authors considered might be confused by "I'll cook you chicken", because they actually don't consider chicken to be "meat".

Language is defined by usage, not organisations.

Vegetarians are people who eat no meat intentionally but may consume milk, eggs, and some other animal byproducts like honey so long as nothing had to directly die or suffer.

Veganism is a higher level where the attempt is to remove all products and foods that are not plant based it that require some other creature too perform outside of it's natural life cycle.

Pescatarians are people who are vegetarians other than the eating of fish.

Raw food advocates do not cook their food.

Jainism has a religious element to their food intake and behavior regarding other creatures.

In any case it's either done for dietary or ethical reasons. The standard diet is to eat what's comfortable or easy with little thought to what you're eating. That's pretty much the only constant as there's numerous other non-veg diets out there that people eat for a variety of reasons religious, dietary, and personal.

Me personally, I'm of the opinion that you should case about what you're eating and as long as you're comfortable with what that means regarding how it's procured, eat up

The word vegan was explained to me, decades ago, by an swissair employee: "VGML is vegan, which is vegetarian, but also without eggs and other animal foods that leave the animal alive, and almost unspiced. If you want spices, you want AVML."

Plus vegans draw the line at different things. Some evidently wont eat figs, some potentially may eat meat if the animal had died naturally.