Author Topic: Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)  (Read 5321 times)

TRex

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Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)
« on: October 14, 2010, 11:01:20 AM »
I realise there is no way to obtain anything close to unanimity as to whether a word is common. We come from different cultures and different generations and have different experiences. Nevertheless, I am surprised that gnostic and congest were excluded from the list of common words as they strike me as more common than scion (outside horticulture or genealogy this word seems rather obscure) cosset (new to me), or cosseting (also new to me).

Some quick Googling for number of hits seems to (mostly  :P) bear this out:
congest -- nearly a million, but congested (15.5 million) and congestive (22 million) -- and it seems familiarity with congested or congestive ought to lead a player to congest
scion -toyota -- over 8.2 million, so it is probably more common than I recognise (I tried to exclude the motor vehicle for obvious reasons)
gnostic -- well over 4.3 million
cosset -- 255,000
cosseting -- 42,500

ensiform

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Re: Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)
« Reply #1 on: October 14, 2010, 11:41:07 AM »
What a cosseted literary life you have led, not to have heard of this word!

Kidding of course.  You have a fine, expansive vocabulary.

I am in agreement that congest is very common.  Am on the fence in re gnostic.  But I do think cosseted is quite common.

mkenuk

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Re: Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)
« Reply #2 on: October 14, 2010, 11:58:18 AM »
I have to agree with both TRex and ensiform; living in Bangkok, the traffic problems here are such that 'congestion' has to be one of the most common words in use in the expat community! My 'arguments' yesterday might have been with 'tocsin' (hardly in everyday use nowadays) and 'cession' (rather a 'technical' term from the field of international politics). 'Gnostic' is sometimes written with a capital, referring to a 2nd century heresy, and as such would certainly be rare. I have no problem with 'cosset' or 'cosseted'; they seem quite familiar to me; finally 'scion'; I had no idea until yesterday that in the US it can be written without the 's' - 'cion'.

birdy

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Re: Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)
« Reply #3 on: October 15, 2010, 01:55:45 AM »
I've never seen scion spelled cion, so I'm surprised at that one.  In fact, when I googled "cion," the  program suggested "scion."

I'm familiar with tocsin (anybody remember that old novel where that was the heroine's name? - or maybe the hero - I read it as a young teenager, and it was old then), cosset/cosseting/cosseted, and gnostic (though more as a back formation from agnostic), but don't remember ever seeing congest except in the forms congested or congestion.

mkenuk

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Re: Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)
« Reply #4 on: October 15, 2010, 12:11:49 PM »
I found the spelling 'cion' in the Concise Oxford; it's shown as "US variant spelling of 'scion'"
mk

birdy

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Re: Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)
« Reply #5 on: October 17, 2010, 01:50:28 AM »
I don't doubt it's there, mkenuk, it's just that I've never seen it.  No doubt as discussed in another thread, I will now find all kinds of examples, just because it's been discussed here!

Alan W

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Re: Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)
« Reply #6 on: October 19, 2010, 06:37:09 PM »
I certainly agree with you on congest, TRex. While it's true that the word is used mostly in the form congested, congest (and congesting) are used fairly frequently too, and wouldn't sound odd or unusual to most people. For example, in Forbes magazine: "Construction workers are bused to the site so that their cars and pickups don't congest the streets."

Gnostic seems a bit more borderline. As mkenuk says, some senses of the word normally use a capital letter, so a person who has encountered it only in such contexts might expect it to be completely unusable in the puzzle, let alone a common word. However, in its lower-case usage, meaning relating to knowledge, especially esoteric mystical knowledge, it pops up in all sorts of contexts: cinema ("Their gnostic faith belongs to no known dogma" - Time magazine on the films of Ingmar Bergman); political satire ("We should wipe the gnostic smirk of self-righteousness off the faces of the moral buttinskis." - P J O'Rourke); and baseball ("Here was the distilled gnostic wisdom of the mound." - James Traub in the NY Times).

So, on balance, I think gnostic ought to be made common.

However, I'm unable to agree that scion, cosset and cosseting are particularly rare. Scion is used fairly often in journalism for a younger member of a distinguished family. An example from the NY Times, from just a couple of days ago: "While Mr. Cuomo’s job approval ratings as attorney general are strong, he still appears to be best known as the scion of a political dynasty." (But the spelling cion is definitely rare - in the US and anywhere else.) And cosset, cosseted and cosseting are all used fairly frequently. For example, cosseting was used about 11 times in the last 12 months in the Guardian and 7 times in the NY Times. Cosseted is used much more often.

Mkenuk's comments about tocsin and cession seem to have some validity. Both are the sorts of words that you would find in most dictionaries, but they do have a rare feel about them. What do people think about these two?
Alan Walker
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rogue_mother

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Re: Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)
« Reply #7 on: October 19, 2010, 10:19:31 PM »
If it were based on my experience, tocsin would be classified as rare. I had to learn its meaning when I first encountered it in Chihuahua a couple of years ago, and I have encountered it in my reading only once since then.

I can't speak to whether cession should be rare or not. It's common enough here at Inside the Beltway, where international politics are of great interest. It doesn't seem to be a 'technical' term to me. In addition, I usually find it when I am looking at all possible -cess- combinations, like recession, procession, and cessation.
Inside the Beltway, Washington, DC metropolitan area

Alan W

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Re: Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)
« Reply #8 on: October 24, 2010, 10:33:14 AM »
Having given some thought to tocsin and cession, I think on balance that they ought to be rare. I tend to lean towards rare in any borderline cases.

Somewhat to my surprise, both words do crop up from time to time in some of the "quality" newspapers. (Though not in the one that lands on my doormat every morning, the Melbourne Age.)

A tocsin may be literally the sound of a bell, as in: "others were in the churches ringing the tocsin as loudly as ever they could" (Guardian). It can also be used figuratively, as in "recollections of the Soviet debacle sounding like a tocsin in the mind" (NY Times - no prizes for guessing which country was being discussed).

Cession can be used for the ceding of territory, as "the cession of Alsace at the end of the Franco-Prussian War" (Times), but it is also used more broadly, as in "the cession of more power to Spain's semi-autonomous regions" (Guardian).

Nevertheless, the use of these words is infrequent, and I feel they would be unfamiliar to quite a few players, so I'll re-class them as rare.
Alan Walker
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Alan W

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Re: Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)
« Reply #9 on: November 23, 2010, 11:13:45 AM »
I haven't yet implemented my decision on these two words, and so they both appeared as common words in yesterday's Challenge. I missed both of them when playing the puzzle, which, in my mind, confirms the correctness of my ruling!

I will switch them soon.
Alan Walker
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redwallylegs

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Re: Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)
« Reply #10 on: December 01, 2010, 07:33:37 PM »
Biro...........can that be made common ?
Dogs are our link to paradise.
They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring -- it was peace. 
--Milan Kundera

rogue_mother

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Re: Common? (13 October 2010 Standard)
« Reply #11 on: December 01, 2010, 10:58:45 PM »
Biro...........can that be made common ?

I would vote no on biro. This word is simply not used in the United States. Most people here wouldn't even have a clue what it meant.
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