As regards
beavering, it seems I was wrong to think
beaver used as a verb, meaning to work busily, is a common usage everywhere. It seems to be much less common in America than in Britain. (It is also common here in Australia.)
While some dictionaries published in the US (such as the one quoted by AQ) label it as British, others do not, so it is not necessarily a clear-cut case of a British-only usage, but it is evidently much rarer in the US. The
British National Corpus has 31 occurrences of
beavering, while the American corpus
COCA, though nearly four times as big, has only 10 examples, and some of these are from British authors writing in US publications.
So, I take your point, TRex and others, that
beavering shouldn't be classed as common. However, I'm not convinced that
bereaving is more common, or even as common.
It raises an issue that we may not have discussed before in the forum. That is, cases where some forms of a verb are much less common than others. In this case,
bereaved is certainly a common word, but
bereave and
bereaving are very seldom used. And when they are used, it is mostly in the mistaken belief that they mean the same as
grieve and
grieving. However,
bereaving doesn't mean mourning a loss - it means causing a loss.
(The alternate past tense
bereft is also fairly common, but its meaning has drifted.)
Bereaving appears only 4 times in COCA, and two of these seem to be used in error for
grieving and one is a mis-transcription of
believing. Leaving only one valid example: "Not even the innocent babe in the cradle was safe from their malice, their schemes at once bereaving mother of child and child of human love." (From a story "Hallowmass", by Esther Friesner, published in
Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2000.) The BNC has no occurrences of
bereaving.
Currently our word list is inconsistent, because
bereaving is rare, but
bereave is common, like
bereaved. I feel that
bereave and
bereaving are equally rare, and only
bereaved is unambiguously common.
But it could be objected that anyone familiar with
bereaved will infer the existence of the other two inflections, even if they have never encountered them. Since the goal in identifying words as common is to focus on the words that players are likely to know, perhaps it could be said that people "know"
bereaving even if they've never heard or seen it used, because they know the rules of regular verb inflection.
I accept that argument up to a point, but I feel that this is a case where the two forms in question are so very rarely used that they don't manage to inherit the common status of their relative. In fact,
bereaved is mostly used in an adjectival role -
the bereaved widow, etc - and a sentence using
bereaved does not normally provide any inspiration on how to construct a natural-sounding sentence using
bereaving. One factor, perhaps, is that this verb always has an object, but rarely a subject.
Anyhow, my conclusions after all this:
beavering and
beavered should become rare. So should
bereave.
Bereaving should stay rare, and
beaver and
bereaved should stay common.
That's all for now - I feel as if I've been beavering away at this for hours now.
