Mariner is in trouble again. He used the word ‘divers’ in his post. He apologizes for using an anachronistic term crowded out by words like type, option, choice, difference and, yes, diverse. Having apologized, he must say that divers is a legitimate word. It has a different, albeit subtle, definition.

He does not know why his brain chose to retain rather acutely the difference between the two words; divers is an active word in his lexicon as is diverse. Divers is spoken di’ vers whereas diverse is spoken di-verse’. Perhaps using a chart with columns and rows may help.

A table has columns. It needs columns because the definition of each column is different from the other columns. Each column, however, has many rows where each item is about the same header but not about other columns because each column is intrinsically different while members of a single column have a common definition.

For example, the human life form has many races like Hispanic, Asian, White, etc. One could say that there are diverse (more comfortable may be ‘a diversity of’) races in the column about the human life form. But there are many different, exclusive life forms, each having their own column and unique row values. One could say there is a divers number of life forms.

True, mariner knows most folks would not choose ‘divers’ but each of us as a divers creature has a diversity of idiosyncrasies – his is an awareness of header relationships versus column relationships. At least they come from the same Latin word; check their entomology.

Ancient Mariner