Author Topic: Redact redux  (Read 2047 times)

Alan W

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Redact redux
« on: November 18, 2013, 12:32:20 PM »
A player sent the following suggestion by email:

Quote
How come “redact” is not in common usage, according to today’s [i.e. Sunday's -AW] Challenge puzzle.  Merriam-Webster says it has been in use since the 15th Century and it certainly shows up regularly in the news.

I replied:

Quote
Thanks for the suggestion. This has been raised before, and I considered the issue in 2009. See https://theforum.lexigame.com/index.php/topic,1655.msg38516.html#msg38516. At that time I concluded that “redact” was coming into wider usage, but I wasn’t convinced it was known widely enough to class it as a common word.

Now four years have passed and it’s probably time to review the situation. I’ll do that, but there’s quite a backlog of suggestions, so it might be a while.
Alan Walker
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pat

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Redact
« Reply #1 on: June 03, 2021, 07:07:16 PM »
Searching for redact before suggesting it should perhaps be made common I found this thread. As your email correspondent said, it's certainly mentioned often enough in the news and I doubt there's a Chi player who's unfamiliar with the word. Maybe its time has come?

yelnats

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Re: Redact redux
« Reply #2 on: June 03, 2021, 07:58:47 PM »
I have just read "Toxic" by Richard Flanagan about the Tasmanian Salmon Industry.

Redact looks to be becoming common...

mkenuk

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Re: Redact redux
« Reply #3 on: June 03, 2021, 09:26:55 PM »
Most definitely, it should be common.

Jacki

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Re: Redact redux
« Reply #4 on: June 04, 2021, 09:03:59 AM »
For the life of me I don’t know why it’s not common. I grew up watching documentaries showing paperwork with big black lines through the paragraphs. Is it called something else in other parts of the world?
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nineoaks

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Re: Redact redux
« Reply #5 on: June 04, 2021, 12:40:34 PM »
common

ridethetalk

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Re: Redact redux
« Reply #6 on: June 05, 2021, 01:09:50 AM »
The Trump presidency taught me what the word redact meant - before that, not so much...
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les303

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Re: Redact redux
« Reply #7 on: June 05, 2021, 12:07:27 PM »
The following document explains exactly why redact should be reclassified :


Jacki

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Re: Redact redux
« Reply #8 on: June 05, 2021, 07:28:39 PM »
 Very funny!!
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Alan W

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Re: Redact redux
« Reply #9 on: June 08, 2021, 04:08:34 PM »
I agree that redact now should be considered a common word. Its usage has blossomed over recent years, as indicated by this chart, from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, showing usage frequency of redact and derived words:



In my earlier comments I noted that William Safire had first encountered the word in the 1980s. And he was a self-proclaimed language maven, and a one-time speech writer for Richard Nixon! And in 2009 the UK Times felt it necessary to inform its readers of the word's meaning.

Redacted is the form of the word that is most often used but the derived noun redaction seems to appear more often than either redacting or redact itself. So in future redact, redacted, redacting and redaction will all be treated as common words.

Alan Walker
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mkenuk

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Re: Redact redux
« Reply #10 on: June 08, 2021, 05:06:31 PM »
And unredacted?
Used a couple of times in the most recent series of the BBC's 'Line of Duty'.

It could be a future 10-letter keyword?

pat

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Re: Redact redux
« Reply #11 on: June 08, 2021, 06:31:43 PM »
Thanks, Alan.

Jacki

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Re: Redact redux
« Reply #12 on: June 08, 2021, 06:55:36 PM »
Hooray - redact is common!!
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Alan W

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Re: Redact redux
« Reply #13 on: June 17, 2021, 02:45:23 PM »
Mike raised the possibility of adding the word unredacted.

This word is listed in Wiktionary and in Dictionary.com at the end of the entry for redacted. The fact that a lot of dictionaries don't have it yet doesn't concern me, as it's only recently been used fairly often. And in any case it's an obvious derivation, with an obvious meaning.

The question is, though, should it be treated as common, and permitted to be used as a seed word for a 10-letter puzzle? If not, we won't actually be seeing the word, because the only other word made up of those letters, underacted, is classed as rare, and the word has 8 different letters, so can't come up in a 7-by-many.

I wish there were some simple way of quantifying the commonness of a word. The iWeb corpus has unredacted as number 52627 in its list of words ranked by frequency of use in the internet. This might seem to make it fairly common, but I find that other words with a similar ranking include some quite obscure terms, like bronchoconstriction, hilar and turbinate, along with some rather more common words, like backflip and complacently.

The News on the Web corpus has quite a few examples from recent years, but only a fraction as many as redacted. On the 15th of June alone, three publications used the word.

However, I don't feel the word has been in general use for long enough to be treated as common just yet. So I will add it as a rare word, and maybe in a while it could be reclassified and installed as a seed word.
Alan Walker
Creator of Lexigame websites