The word organic gets thrown around a lot, be it in packaging, advertising, scholarly writing, or daily speech. Data taken from all of these sources reveal that this word, technically an adjective, has taken on the grammatical role of a noun. Specific linguistic tools have been used by interested parties in the organic movement to affect this transformation, which reveals a great deal about the nature of semantic change in the modern world as well as the ways that language both shapes and reveals the way we think about our food.
