common word? Aug 1 spoiler

[Tom44]

I've been having a bad run.  Missing all the common words by one or two.  I keep hoping its a word I didn't know, but yesterday I missed by 3 common words, like "back."  Today was different.  I missed sillies.  Silly me, could have played it, but never dreamed it was a common word.  Is this a Britishism?  Or am I just odd here.

[Les303]

Your certainly not on your " Pat - malone " mate.

I can only offer this suggestion although it is not always successful.
When i am struggling to find the last couple of words , i will take a break for 30 minutes or so then when i log back in that " easy " word will be very obvious & i am left scratching my head as to how i ever missed it.

What i find even more frustrating is ( particularly in those games with a large number of " easy " words ) i will identify a word & because there are so many words already played , i won't bother to check & think to myself that i would surely have already played that word only to find out it was played in a different game on that day or perhaps even the previous day.

As for those bloody plurals ..they catch me out just about every time.

[yelnats]

In OzEnglish, I haven't heard 'sillies' for a long time. It was a childhood word, maybe from a mother to children, or one group of kids to another.

I didn't get it.

[Les303]

It just sounds silly to me.

[anona]

Yelnats: I'm British, and I agree with you about use of "sillies". Affectionate, and usually used by mothers or children. As I get older, I find it hard to judge when/which words I know well are not used by younger people.

[TRex]

I didn't get it.

Nor did I.

[Tom44]

TRex, you are a star at getting the common words.  If you missed it too, I don't feel so silly for missing it.

[Alan W]

I don't know whether sillies (and silly as a noun that can be made plural) is specifically British. But it is quite rare, and I don't think it should remain as a common word.

Searches on sillies turn up a lot of references to The Three Sillies, an English folk tale that appeared in an 1890 book called English Fairy Tales, collected by Joseph Jacobs. A few years ago an updated version of the story, under the same title, was published by US children's writer Steven Kellogg.

A recent appearance of the word in literature was in The Stray Sod Country (2010) by Patrick McCabe: "O you men! she chuckled... You really can be such sillies at times, do you know that?" The book is set in Ireland in the 1950s.

[anonsi]

This weekend, I caught myself saying "You sillies!" to my husband and young daughter. I'm not sure if it was subconscious because I had read this thread.

 

But, either way, sillies is not uncommon to me and it's used in the same as others have mentioned.