revisiting a suggestion

[nineoaks]

 
I have been thinking about the word 'stent.' I think it is currently a 'rare' word. Back in 2009, a suggestion was made to reclassify it as 'common.' I could not find a ruling on this. I apologize if I have missed any further discussion or a decision, and would like to know what others think. 


Thanks,

nineoaks

[birdy]

Maybe it's my age - or the age of the people I know - but I've been hearing this word much more often in recent years.

[Tom]

I agree, Birdy. I would have lost count of the number of individuals I know who have had stent/stents placed in an artery/arteries somewhere in the body, more often than not a cornary artery. It is far preferred by coronary speciliasts (and patients) where it is suitable to open heart bypass. Definitely a very common word.

[Tom]

I know, the record is stuck, but please explain to me how 'souk', an alternative to 'souq', is common. Just a smidge more common than hen's teeth I would have thought! Same goes for 'souse' and 'torus'. I just don't get it.

[mkenuk]

Both Chambers and my trusty old COD give 'souk' as the first spelling with 'suk', 'sukh' and 'suq' as alternatives (but not 'souq'!). Ninjawords (whose reliability I'm still not sure of - remember 'thick hit from a sticky lie'- ) has 'souk' as an alternative to 'souq'. For what it's worth, 'Windows wonderful spellchecker' only recognizes 'souk'.

You pays your money and you takes your choice, as the man said.

This sort of thing is always going to happen with words transliterated from languages which don't use Roman spelling. I can remember reading somewhere that there were at least thirteen different ways of writing in English the surname of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

MK

[rhino]

Different spelling are not limited to transliterated words - think of the number of variations for spelling Shakespeare ... but I do agree that "souk" is definitely not a common usage word.

[mkenuk]

Shakespeare lived long before anyone had the idea of trying to regulate spelling (so few people could read or write anyway), so it really was a case of 'anything goes'.
 As for 'souk' it's certainly familiar to anyone who has ever worked anywhere in the Middle East. Also more people are taking holidays in North Africa and some of the more liberal Gulf states, so that the word is probably better known than it was a few years ago.

MK

[birdy]

Souk doesn't seem all that uncommon to me, though I have not yet visited the Middle East*.  I've come across it in books (mysteries and espionage novels mostly) set in that area.

* I understand there are birds there, so I may get there eventually. 

[pat]

* I understand there are birds there, so I may get there eventually. 

I'll come with you, Birdy.

[TRex]

I know, the record is stuck, but please explain to me how 'souk', an alternative to 'souq', is common. Just a smidge more common than hen's teeth I would have thought! Same goes for 'souse' and 'torus'. I just don't get it.

Different spelling are not limited to transliterated words - think of the number of variations for spelling Shakespeare ... but I do agree that "souk" is definitely not a common usage word.

Apparently, souk never made it into the Word List Suggestions

I don't think souk is common.

[mkenuk]

One thought that struck me, I doubt if any Chi-ite would suggest that the word 'bazaar' should be anything but common, yet the two words have exactly the same meaning, and both originate in the Middle East (one Persian or Farsi, the other Arabic).
Now, if the magazine had been named 'Harper's Souk'........


 >:DMK

[Maudland]

I think souk is common enough, and seems to be the standard spelling. It's certainly more familiar to me, and I have come across it more (and I can say the same about litotes) than many of the technical and scientific words that are classed as common. I don't quibble about those as they represent my ignorance rather than the words' rareness. We all have different areas of knowledge and experience and Chi is a great place for expanding those, even if only from the armchair. It would be a sadness for me if we started shrinking the definition of common in Chi in the same way as vocabulary has shrunk over the last 10 years or so... Like, whatever...

[rogue_mother]

I am totally with Tom, TRex  Rhino about souk. It is not common at all in the United States. Birdy, being a New Yorker, may be more cosmopolitan than the rest of us. Everyone knows bazaar. Churches and charities hold bazaars; they don't hold souks. And, MK, we pretty much don't vacation in North Africa or the more liberal Middle Eastern Gulf states. Those who go in the line of duty aren't writing home about the souks.

And getting back to the original question, I would not disagree with stent being common. I read and hear about them often.

[mkenuk]

And, MK, we pretty much don't vacation in North Africa or the more liberal Middle Eastern Gulf states.
.

I'm not altogether sure about that, RM. I remember hearing lots of American accents during my visit to the Pyramids, for example. Mind, that was pre-9/11, so maybe things have changed.

There have always been plenty of Americans working in the Middle East, lots of teachers and oilmen; Aramco (the Arabian American Company) at one time employed many thousands of expat American oil workers. Most of them lived in Dhahran which, at that time, was a replica of a small American town. It was for expatriates only, and was the one place in Saudi Arabia where women could drive cars.  They also had Greyhound buses running to nearby towns., allowing people to visit the gold souks in Dammam and Al Khobar.

But whatever people's reasons for being in that part of the world - civilian worker, military personnel, pilgrim or tourist, most of them will leave knowing little more than a few words of Arabic; but one of those words will almost certainly be 'souk'. If nothing else, it's where people went to buy gifts and souvenirs to take home with them.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia page for 'Souq' lists no fewer than 11 variant spellings of the word which is virtually the same in both Arabic and Hebrew; many of them have only three letters, however, so they won't be a problem for Chi solvers.

MK

[rogue_mother]

And, MK, we pretty much don't vacation in North Africa or the more liberal Middle Eastern Gulf states.
.

I'm not altogether sure about that, RM. I remember hearing lots of American accents during my visit to the Pyramids, for example. Mind, that was pre-9/11, so maybe things have changed.

There have always been plenty of Americans working in the Middle East, lots of teachers and oilmen; Aramco (the Arabian American Company) at one time employed many thousands of expat American oil workers. ...

But whatever people's reasons for being in that part of the world - civilian worker, military personnel, pilgrim or tourist, most of them will leave knowing little more than a few words of Arabic; but one of those words will almost certainly be 'souk'. If nothing else, it's where people went to buy gifts and souvenirs to take home with them.
...

MK

Yes, but a drop in the bucket when compared with a population of three hundred million people. I personally know a couple who visited the pyramids, and people who worked in Saudi Arabia. But compared to the general population as a whole, the number is miniscule. I'm sure most of the people who visited places with souks learned the word. But I have never heard anyone use it in a conversation or use it in their writing. When I lived in the Panama Canal Zone, I went shopping in tiendas and mercados; however, when I tell my acquaintances about my experiences, I use the English words, shops and markets. In my experience most Americans who travel abroad do similarly.

The Americans I know mostly go to places in Europe, the Caribbean, Central and South America, Australia, and the Pacific islands. Some comparatively few do go to the Middle East, particularly Israel (not a place with souks), and some go to Southeast Asia, and some go to India or China. Two of the Rogue Nieces even went to Morocco, but that was extremely bizarre, because it's not a place where Americans typically think of going. One of the nieces had already spent a summer abroad in Mongolia, another non-typical destination. British people, on the other hand, think nothing of jumping on an airplane and going on holiday in Morocco (at least as it seems from what I have read on the Forum) or Turkey, probably the way Americans go to the Caribbean or Mexico.