The biggest lexical thrill in the Oscars came when Frances McDormand dropped the phrase “inclusion rider”, something that would ensure better representation of minorities in a film’s cast and crew. But why does it mean that?

Most familiarly, a rider lists a rock band’s backstage demands – crates of booze, bowls of M&M’s with no brown ones, and so on. (Van Halen insisted on the latter to check the venue paid attention to detail.) It derives from the sense of “rider” as anything that goes atop something else: so a rider, from the 17th century, was an addition to a legislative bill or a contract.

The political sense of “inclusion”, meanwhile, dates from the 1950s in the US, when the American Nurses’ Association, for example, promoted the “inclusion and participation of minority groups”. Thereafter, “inclusion” broke free from the obligation to specify who exactly should be included.

As an ideal it is often interchangeable with “diversity”, yet semantically it points in the opposite direction: diversity is a spreading out; inclusion is a gathering in. No one wants to be excluded. So, happily, “inclusion” is the more inclusive word.