Wordwatch: Commonplace
“Instances of heavy rainfall leading to flash flooding are going to become more commonplace due to climate change,” – report, 2 August 2021.
I was pulled up short when I read this. Why say “commonplace” when the obvious word here is “common”, meaning “usual”? This is a classic example of someone casually employing a word that sounds similar to the one needed, and in the process subtly changing the meaning of what they are saying. Think about it for a minute: the two words “common” and “commonplace” don’t mean quite the same thing.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tells us that “commonplace” was originally a listing or “placing” of particular specified instances, from which came the “commonplace book”, a compilation of citations or quotations. The dictionary gives “authoritative” as a synonym for “commonplace” with the connotation of “to be cited as a reliable authority”. The sense of a common point of reference led to a new meaning: “trite” or “platitudinous”, which is given as a later definition.
This more recent sense embodies a characteristic demotion of the word from the technical to the popular or mundane. The usual meaning of “commonplace” today is “ordinary”, “unexceptional”.
So “commonplace” has evolved from denoting something exceptional, to be listed as interesting, to meaning something trivial or uninteresting because encountered too frequently. But in the example that surprised me the other day, we have a new extension of that “new” meaning: it is surely nonsense to say that heavy rainfall or flooding is “trite” or “uninteresting because encountered too often”.
Hardly a vital change of sense, you will say. But I pick it out as an example of how the connotations of a word spread to adjacent areas of meaning, often simply by verbal suggestion: to say “commonplace” when “common” is required, could almost be a mere slip of the tongue or typing finger.
And we are noticing this sort of change, or slip, more and more frequently now, with the proliferation of the channels of verbal communication – news bulletins that we can access from all over the world on our smartphones, to say nothing of the social media sites where English is written by people who have no interest, and certainly no training, in using the language according to generally acknowledged rules.
Of course in the past, and throughout history, people have used words as they liked, though the majority used them according to some set of rules, whether formally written down or simply inherited or passed on. Without some agreement as to what words mean and how they are used there can be no communication.
Today we are witnessing such an extraordinary expansion of the whole field of verbal communication, in dimensions that a few years ago hadn’t been dreamt of, that we can expect ever-creasing digressions from, and modifications to, what we used to regard as standard English. One of my purposes in this column is to monitor those changes. We can do nothing to prevent them.
But we can, and I think it’s important that we should, train ourselves to be alert to these sometimes infinitesimal shifts or we shall run the risk of becoming incomprehensible to each other, and of no longer being able to communicate intelligibly.
You think I’m a Cassandra prophesying doom – but remember that Cassandra was right (Troy did fall), and her disbelievers turned out to be catastrophically wrong. And the future may well bring things rather worse than heavy rainfall and flash flooding: misunderstanding each other at the commonplace level of words won’t help us to deal with that future, I prophesy.