You are a person interested in equity, diversity, and inclusion (or EDI), so you are excited to attend conference sessions that have the words equity, diversity, and inclusion in the titles and descriptions. However, these panels are not always what you expect. They mean all learning styles are equal. They mean the participants come from a diversity of places. They mean libraries should include more civility between colleagues. If you are a librarian whose professional interest is firmly rooted in EDI, you wonder how conference presenters can use these words without realizing that they have scholarly significance to those who engage in this work every day. These presentations could be from any library conference at any time in the last fifteen years. It goes beyond the scope of this paper, but we suspect this applies to professional development in many fields: the words equity, diversity, and inclusion have been bleached of their EDI meanings
