system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
A woman with a long history with major chemical corporations told me yesterday that CO2, Diamonds and Pencil Lead were Organic, is she right?

Now to Clarify I work with this woman, L (chemist with history at major chemical producers)

I'm in the IT Department, we had dinner last night with another colleague (PhD environmental biology). Now during the meal they were chatting chemistry and L's work history and such, I wasn't paying full attention because I don't know anything about chemistry.

But basically it came up that anything that contains Carbon is organic. So, being curious I asked L if a diamond would be organic. She says yes, anything that contains carbon is organic. I ask if there's a difference between the term "organic" to a chemist as opposed to a biologist, she replies that "organic is just a Marketing term" but doesn't really answer my question and just acted a bit  condescending about the fact that I don't have a chemistry background.

I asked a friend of mine who took high school chemistry and he said he'd never heard of it and that I should ask her if CO^2 is organic, she says it is...

So my question, because she was rude and I wasn't interested in asking again, is 

> Is the term Organic meaning anything with carbon in it a term only used as such in chemistry?

I had learned that organic meant that it was an organism, that it had lived at some point or another.

**TL;DR: My coworker told me that any carbon containing compound is organic, but I always learned that organic meant that it was once living.**
gpt
The term "organic", in chemistry, is defined somewhat arbitrarily. Some define it as compounds that were at some point part of a living organism. A more common definition is a compound with a carbon in it, but excluding a few groups of compounds such as carbonates, carbides and simple carbon-oxides (such as CO2). Almost all organic compounds contain carbon-hydrogen bonds (C-H).

You'll note the repeated use of the term 'compound'. The definition of a compound is a molecule consisting of atoms of at least 2 different types. By definition, this means that diamond is not an organic compound.

Ultimately, this question is not so much a matter of absolute truth or falsehood, but rather of what the definition of the term "organic" is that one works with. There is no unifying property that separates organics from inorganics that everyone agrees on.

However, the most commonly used definitions consider things like diamond and carbondioxide to be inorganic.

Note that the chemistry notion of organic is unrelated to the agricultural/biological notion. In agriculture, an organicly grown crop is one that has not been treated with artificial products. Again, you can quibble over the exact details (and people often do).