From yesterday's 7-by-many

deferrer - one who defers--rare
defier - one who defies  - rare
edifier-- one who edifies --rare
filer - one who files - rare
firer- one who fires - rare
fleer - one who flees - rare
riffler - one who riffles - rare
but
rifler - one who rifles - common!!


Where is the logic?

I missed one common word in yesterday's game. Guess which word it was!!

Grrrrrrrrr!

re the rosebush 7-by-many game a few days ago

rosebush was common
rosebushes was rare

Anyone else find that a bit strange?

I'm not a scientist by any means and I do admit to having had to look up the meaning of quite a few 'common' scientific terms that have appeared in Chi from time to time.
'kinesis' however is one 'scientific' term that I do know, along with 'kinetic' and that favourite of sci-fi/fantasy/horror fiction writers - 'telekinesis'.
It appears fairly often in Chi, most recently in the 'penknives' 7-by-many game;  it gathered not the highest number of hits by any means, (94/291) but far from the lowest - that was 'pepsin' with 47.
Does anyone else agree with me that this word should be classed as 'common'?

I was quite astonished to play sometimes in yesterday's smokiest seven-by-many and get 'sorry, not known'. Such a common word not known? Then the penny dropped.

Presumably it's because sometime is allowed as common and the Chi-computer has misinterpreted the 's'-inflexion rule.

sometime is an adjective meaning 'former' or 'erstwhile';('sometime boss /lover /friend etc');  being an adjective, in English it can't be inflected.
sometimes is an adverb of frequency; it is not the 'plural' of sometime

A similar thing happens with the possessives - your/yours and their/theirs, adjective and pronoun respectively; most certainly not singular and plural,

In yesterday's 7-by- many game the 'keyword' was peafowl. It provided another example of variant spellings of an Arabic word. (Remember kebab / kabob a week or so ago?)

felafel (which my semi-literate spell-checker has just redlined) scored 59 hits (from 297) and was awarded 'common'.
falafel  (an alternative spelling, which my spell-check has also redlined, suggesting I might mean 'fella'), got 97 hits and was given 'rare'.

A glance at Google Ngram viewer would suggest that falafel is the more common of the two by some way in both British and American English.
Certainly during my time in the Middle East falafel seemed to be the 'accepted' transliteration.

Would a 'swapover' be in order for these two words?

A bit surprised to see gulag included as a common word (in yesterday's tautology 7-by many), not least because I'd always seen it capitalized.

Apparently the word is a Russian acronym meaning 'Chief Administration for Collective Labo(u)r Camps' 
Certainly sounds as though it should   be capitalized



 

I played arrears in yesterday's 7-by-many and was quite surprised to see that it was classed as 'uncommon'.

Going by our normal rule of thumb, I would have been fairly sure that arrears or the phrase 'in arrears' would be familiar to most educated native speakers everywhere.

According to the COD, arrears is a plural noun, which generally means that it has no singular.
It does, however, also mention the phrase 'in arrear' but points out that this is 'chiefly law' ie lawyers' jargon.
arrear was also classed as 'uncommon'