Lexigame Community
General Category => Words => Topic started by: mkenuk on February 24, 2018, 11:47:12 PM
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re the recent conductive 10-letter game.
Is oviduct really common?
Surely it's a 'technical' term used mainly among obstetricians and gynaecologists - and then only 'periodically'!
One for re-classification, perhaps?
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Seems common enough to me.
9oaks
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I can't honestly say that oviduct is an everyday word, but it seems like one that ought to be known by reasonably well-read speakers of English. One can't escape oviducts in nature shows about sea turtles, platypuses, and chickens and other birds. It was not the last common I found -- not even the next to last. And for the record, I am not a gynecologist or biologist of any sort.
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I'll display my ignorance yet again, and admit I have never heard the word or read it. But then I watch very little television.
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Me too Anona.
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Actually, just to qualify my previous post - I’ve never heard of the word (but I do watch tv!)
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...not sure what tv has to do with it. I don't even have a tv, but I did take basic biology...
9oaks
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..., but I did take basic biology...
9oaks
Ah, there you have me. I went to an all-boys Catholic school, with a teaching staff dominated by priests.
Biology? No, not on the syllabus after the first year. (We learned the anatomy of the insect, the fish and the bird as I remember - I can still recite the parts we learned by rote - 'coxa, trochanter, femur, tibia, tarsus'!!!)
Human biology? Absolutely no way.
Human biology which would involve learning the names of parts of the female anatomy? Never in a million years.
To compensate we had lots of Latin and a daily Religious lesson.......(No cold showers. It wasn't a boarding school.).
I might add that the word oviduct is now not altogether unfamiliar to me.
I simply feel that, like many terms from science, it's not common.
If nothing else, all that Latin would have been able to tell me what the word meant without looking it up!
The fact that it was seen by only 15 players in that game might also suggest that it should not be classed as common.
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I ducked that one.
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Seems common to me, in the sense that it would be known to, as Rogue Mother says, a reasonably well-read speaker of English. That wouldn't have stopped me from missing it, though, if I'd played that game. But I'm capable of missing much more common words (like how many times have I missed "acre"?).
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"...not sure what tv has to do with it. I don't even have a tv, but I did take basic biology...
9oaks"
It's just that that rogue mother mentioned "shows". I wouldn't be going to live shows on snakes, chickens or fish, which leaves television as a possible accidental source. I did in fact do basic biology at school, but we concentrated on human and plant biology after the inevitable amoeba and spirogella. So "Fallopian tube" was the only term I learnt for an egg canal.
The nearest we got to other vertebrates was the biology master killing a mouse in a vacuum device to prove animals needed air (I have still not forgiven him; I would have believed him without the death) and a dead lamb he brought in and cut up to demonstrate I have forgotten what.
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(like how many times have I missed "acre"?).
Spoiler alert! I was just doing today's standard and what was the last word I got!
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Dear anona,
My apologies. I wasn't careful enough in reading previous posts. Please forgive any offense my post caused.
sincerely,
nineoaks
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ThassOK, nineoaks. You must be quite unusual in not having a television. There have been times when we haven't - during one of these, a man from the TV licensing lot came, put his foot in the door when I opened it, and insisted on coming in to search the property. (Having nothing to hide I thought it would save another rude visit if I didn't put up a fight but just let him lose face.) He couldn't believe he wouldn't find a television - even checking in cupboards. Did he think we'd plug the television in for a quick fix and then hide it away again, I wonder?
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Thanks, anona, and thanks for that funny story re: license fee guy. (Did he check the priest hole? I'll bet he missed that! >:D)
Many years (oh, dear, I can start saying decades now) ago, I mentioned to my class of nine-year-olds that I didn't have a tv. Soon after, I learned that they were secretly collecting money among themselves to buy me one. I thanked them for their thoughtfulness, and explained that it was my choice not to have a tv. This was a shocking new possibility for them, and I suppose they eventually chalked it up to just one more strange idea from the adult world.
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(like how many times have I missed "acre"?).
Spoiler alert! I was just doing today's standard and what was the last word I got!
I hadn't even looked at the game when I wrote that! It must come up often - I think I miss it most times. I'm not too good at "acme" either.
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There are some words that I think belong in our common words, because most people would probably have encountered them, even though they are far from everyday words. But is oviduct such a word? I think ovine, which was in the same puzzle, belongs in that category. But ovine was played by 104 people, while oviduct was found by only 15, although this might be partly due to the fact that ovine comes up in our puzzles more often, so some players might know it only from Chi.
But oviduct seems to be used quite infrequently in print, and then often in specialist titles, like Smallholder and Horsetalk. I don't know of any way to assess the frequency of use of words in TV nature documentaries, though an article in the Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/05/every-episode-of-david-attenboroughs-life-series-ranked/480678/) mentions that episode 6 of David Attenborough's classic Life on Earth series covered "a Nectophrynoides toad, which raises her tadpole inside her body on flakes of oviduct tissue, and gives birth to the froglet by squeezing it out with her lungs."
On the whole I feel that oviduct falls a little below the threshold of visibility. It will be treated as a rare word in future.
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Thanks, Alan. To me oviduct is a good example of what I would call a 'text-book word'.
Students will learn it (and many others like it) before an important test and then promptly forget it.
Later, unless they enter a career related to medicine, or perhaps veterinary science, they'll probably only ever meet the word again in crosswords, scrabble or other word-games.
The various adjectives ending with -ine and describing common mammals - feline, canine, bovine, equine etc - are (imho) much more common and much more likely to turn up in novels and everyday reading.
One interesting one is murine. Although the creature that it relates to is very common indeed, I can't remember ever seeing it in a Chi game.
Is it classed as common?
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No, Mike, murine is rare.
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One interesting one is murine. Although the creature that it relates to is very common indeed,
I had only heard of 'murine' as eye drops. Proves you are never too old to learn something new.
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I only knew the ear wax remover trade name, and never would have connected it with the genus name Mus (which I did know). A handy new word! Now to use it three times and it will be mine. Might be hard to work it into conversation though...