retune uncommon?

[mkenuk]

Am I alone in thinking that 'retune' and its derivatives 'retuned' etc, which have appeared as uncommon in a few recent puzzles deserve to be reclassified as common?

[pat]

Well it's something we do at band practice every week, so as far as I'm concerned it's common!

[rogue_mother]

I don't picture retune as a common word, but I suppose it could be. In all the bands and orchestras that I or my children have been associated with, we always tuned our instruments before we started. It could be argued that we were actually retuning them, since they were once in tune, but we didn't say that. Practically speaking, retuning is what you do once a performance has begun and you have to tune the instrument once more. Is this usage common? Dunno.

[Tom44]

Seems common to me.

[Alan W]

The most interesting thing I learnt in researching this is that newspapers don't do a very good job of proofreading these days. When I searched for retune on News Limited's Australian website, 6 of the first 10 results were obviously meant to be return - e.g. "life retuned to some degree of normality". And Rupert Murdoch wants us to pay to read this stuff online?

That kind of result - where a search retunes returns more typos than actual uses of the word - usually means that the word is reasonably uncommon. And where the word was intentionally used, on various newspaper sites, it was often in specialist articles - about cars and electronic systems, for example.

It's probably a border-line case, but in such cases, I lean towards a rare classification, so I'm inclined to leave things as they are, mkenuk.

[mkenuk]

Thanks for the reply, and obviously I accept your judgement. What I found interesting was the fact that others seem to think of 'retune' as referring to musical instruments. My first idea was that the word referred primarily to retuning a radio that was sending out a distorted noise. Anyway, 'uncommon' it shall be.