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« on: August 09, 2017, 10:24:27 PM »
I have two uncles even older than I am (they are 80 and 87) who competitively play the Target word puzzle in The Age newspaper each day.
The wordlist is more-or-less derived from Chambers Dictionary. My older uncle insists on using the Shorter Oxford as his authority. My younger uncle finds this “irritating”.
I must say I agree with my younger uncle. Just accept the words allowed by the compiler and get on with it.
Alan puts a huge effort into protecting the integrity of the website and - barrister or judge-like - puts his case whether various words should be regarded as common or rare. This makes for interesting reading and is illuminating and scholarly about the origins and uses of words.
For example, I learned a great deal about the word “solidus”. The only time I’d come across the word solidus was several years ago when a friend asked me to get an opinion about a “Byzantine” / eastern Roman empire coin.
I suggested that the word “coir” was common and I accept Alan’s judgment that it isn’t. I would suggest, however, that it is more common than the word “peatier”: I thought of this because peat and coir are analogous in gardeners’ minds but I’d imagine that the use of the word “peatier” is largely confined to reviews of whisky. There are a number of “common” comparative adjectives that are hardly common, eg bandiest or, just a day or so ago: hammiest.
Alan argued, in disallowing “coir” as common:
“Coir is a fibre from the husks of coconuts, used to make mats, rope, garden products, etc. Anyone who has recently been shopping for a doormat may well have come across the word, but then how often does a person shop for doormats? Publications elsewhere don't seem to use the word very much. And when they do, it's mainly in gardening and home decor sections, which not everyone reads.
“I don't want words to be common just because they commonly appear in Chi puzzles!”
But, so why is “eland” common? I happen to have grown up in southern Africa (where elands are indeed common). I doubt whether the word “eland” enters into the minds of the overwhelming majority of word game players except when they are playing a word game. By this argument, “eland” has less justification to be called common than “coir”.
But there are number of other words that I don’t regard as common:
Take “duodena”: Half my career was spent as a medical librarian and, while the word is grammatically correct, I don’t recollect ever having heard it before. On the US National Library’s MEDLINE Plus database it has occurred 161 times since 1966 (in over 10 million documents) and some of these are obviously typos for duodenal. If you google “duodena” and go past the ludicrous estimate of over 100,000 hits, you will find that there are at the very most under 400 items, not all of which are in English.
I won’t go irritatingly on and I’ll happily accept Alan’s verdicts and I’ll try to remember “solidus” next time!
Thanks again Alan.