And here is Madeleine Ibes’s first blog post:
Whilst doing my weekly reading for the course Testing Prescriptivism, I stumbled across a term I had never heard before. The book I was reading was a study done by Mittins et al., Attitudes on English Usage (1970), which was on the acceptability of certain usage problems in the late 1960s, one of which has been written about on this blog before.
What I stumbled upon was an interesting usage problem, or perhaps an interesting reaction to such a problem. Instead, it was a word that I found in the following passage:
The invitation to extend the list of debatable usages produced well over two hundred different items, of which the great majority were explicitly or implicitly condemned. There were one or two pleas for tolerance (e.g. ‘of such local habits of speech as “To get a hold of”’) and a few expressions of genuine uncertainty (e.g. ‘ “five foot/ feet high”’ ). But (incidentally, the initial use of but or and was included on the black list!) by far the commonest sentiments expressed were those of disapproval, irritation, shock and guilt. (Mittins et al. 1970:12)
Can you spot the word that I was most struck by?
In case you couldn’t, it was the word commonest, used by the authors here instead of most common. Growing up as I did in the Northern United States, this was not a word I had ever seen or heard used before. For me, common was a word that I was taught to have the following degrees: common, less/more common and most common. Not commoner or commonest, in other words. Now I wondered how I hadn’t, in all my academic years, come across this word before! Was I ignorant? Was I simply a bad native English speaker?
The answer to why I hadn’t seen this word before, it seems, is actually quite simple. Upon further research, I discovered that this word had seldom been used in the U.S., and since the 1910s, has been on a relatively steady decline in terms of actual usage. This can be seen in the following graph, produced by using Google N-Gram, whilst searching the American English corpus for the word commonest:
However, the Google N-Gram graph for the British English corpus paints a different picture:
Indeed, the word commonest has led a fairly different life in British English. Instead of steadily declining from the 1910s onward, the word experienced an almost uninterrupted general incline until the 1970s, when it sharply declined and eventually levelled out.
The Mittins et al. survey was published in 1970 by Oxford University Press, close to the height of this word’s usage in British English. It makes sense, then, that it was used in the same way that I would use most common. Furthermore, these graphs also explain why I hadn’t seen this before in my life, academic or otherwise, having grown up reading and dealing with largely American texts.
Do you like the word commonest? Or do you prefer more common? Why? Please tell us by filling in this poll, and by leaving a comment to this post if you wish.
Sources:
Mittins, W.H., Mary Salu, Mary Edminson and Sheila Coyne (1970), Attitudes to English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grammatical rules change si volet usus (“if it be the will of custom”, according to Horace, in his 
This almost seems to be an aesthetic argument in favour of prescription. However, the comment doesn’t explicitly say that writing twenties in letters rather than numbers (20s) looks prettier: it only says that a writer could benefit from writing it that way, because a reader might have a more pleasant reading experience as a result.
While typos are errors Queen and Boland link to keyboarding issues, such as spelling <the> as <teh>, grammos constitute “traditional peever errors that are only relevant in written language”. Thus, a grammo would be the use of to instead of too, for example. Typos are often considered simple mistakes caused by carelessness and rushed typing. Grammos, on the other hand, seem to be evaluated more harshly and to affect the writer’s personality, as the writer’s abilities and knowledge are questioned. Queen and Boland sought to identify whether the participants’ demographics and personality traits can be linked to attitudes towards such mistakes. 83 English-speaking Americans participated in their study which showed no significant correlations between attitudes and social variables such as gender, age or level of education. However, Queen and Boland found that personality traits (introvert/extrovert) showed differences in how spelling errors are perceived. Introverts, according to their study, seem to be bothered more by typos than extroverts.
I can’t help noticing an increasing use of letterlijk en figuurlijk as an intensifier in Dutch (as with literally in English) instead of referring to the ambiguity of the word it modifies. You might think that using letterlijk en figuurlijk as an intensifier is wrong. But I would rather call it an oxymoron, which the online version of the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines as “
Ina Huttenga is the next student from the MA course Testing Prescriptivism to present her first blog post:
Bridging the Unbridgeable 