Lexigame Community
General Category => Words => Topic started by: rogue_mother on February 22, 2015, 04:02:00 AM
-
Only eight out of two hundred twenty players in yesterday's ten-letter challenge (CYBERSPACE) got a rosette, and most of those were the usual suspects at the top of the scoreboard. I suspect that baccy was the primary culprit.
If the Google n-gram viewer is to be believed, the word baccy is used twice as often in British English (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=baccy&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=18&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbaccy%3B%2Cc0) as in American English (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=baccy&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbaccy%3B%2Cc0). Even then it is not common, since it occurs less than 0.0000040% of the time. My opinion is that baccy should be removed from the list of common words.
-
Thanks, RM. My eyebrows went up when I saw 'baccy' as one of the words I had missed.
9O
-
RM there are lots of words in this game that are dubious even as rare (my favourite is 'asap')
I must admit I thought baccy would be an Americanism for tobacco.Havent looked it up- what does it mean?
Anyway I agree with you it should be removed
But I am very happy atm because I got my first rosette ever in todays standard puzzle!!
greetings to you
-
Congrats on the rosette, smaug!
Baccy is indeed short for tobacco, but according to the Oxford Dictionaries website (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/baccy), it is chiefly British.
-
Perhaps best known from its use in Kipling's 'A Smuggler's Song':
'Five and twenty ponies trotting through the dark,
Brandy for the Parson, 'baccy for the Clerk,
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
So watch the wall, my darling
While the gentlemen go by'
although, at least in the version of the poem I have, it is written with an apostrophe, disqualifying it from Chi altogether!
Also commonly used (in UK at least) in the phrase 'wacky baccy' referring (usually) to cannabis.
Common? probably not - I certainly didn't see it in the 'cyberspace' game; at least it didn't cost me a rosette; I also missed 'peccary'!!
MK
-
Baccy being a common word, although generally used in the UK, was made up for by dweeb being classed as common in yesterday's bedfellow puzzle, a word generally used in the US. I'd suggest that neither or both of them should be made rare.
-
oh yes plenty of give and take twixt British/American/Australian English. Where does one draw the line?
Ask the boss!
-
Indeed, and good to see you back on the forum, Smaug. It's been a long time.
-
Yes indeed it has Pat!
The rosette gave me some confidence I must say. I was playing another game with friends and got sidetracked, as well as life getting busy
Glad to see some of me old mates still here
-
In Britain and some other countries, baccy, though used infrequently, is probably known to most people. It's used in reports about government tobacco taxes, and "Big Baccy" is sometimes used for the tobacco industry. In January 2017, English local paper the Hartlepool Mail had a headline: "Man who tried to rob Hartlepool 'baccy baron' is jailed". And there's also the wacky baccy expression that MK mentioned.
However, it's hard to find a single instance of US use of the word. It is used in dialogue in a Hermann Melville story and a few other 19th century works of fiction. Without studying these texts in detail, I don't know whether the characters using the word are American. In any case, it's probably not a word that most contemporary Americans would know, so it will be re-classified as rare.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.