Word: commonization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Stevey started out writing arrogant articles for Chicago zines. (He was also in a New Wave band, but he'd probably prefer that you didn't know that.) As a zine writer, Albini demanded "independence, self-determination, absolute total honesty and common sense" from bands and was always ready to write some off as sellouts. In 1982, he formed Big Black. Big Black is a band you've probably never heard of. Steve likes it this way. After a couple years of touring and a couple albums, Big Black broke up because too maybe people liked them. Meaning about...
Linguists have offered other solutions. The most common alternative--which has become acceptable in everyday speech despite its grammatical incorrectness--is to follow the gender-unspecific subject with the plural "they" ("If anyone wants to, they can pick up their paper..."). This construction may not sound too bad when spoken, but it doesn't look too good on paper. Another possibility is the hybrid "s/he." However, whereas "they" seems awkward on paper, "s/he" is awfully hard to pronounce in everyday speech. A few years ago, Expos instructor Nathaniel Lewis came up with a novel solution to the pronoun problem when...
True, pronouns like "thee" and "thou" have basically disappeared from common usage. But as Associate Professor of Linguistics Bert Vaux says, "Language has a mind of its own...Changes can not be willed by people; they almost always arise unconsciously." In other words, those who might wish to introduce the pronoun "e" into common usage would almost certainly fail, just as feminists who have endorsed the new spelling of "womyn" have met with linguistic resistance...
...Running as a candidate in a local election todraw attention to issues is a common endeavor,"Winters says...
...private manner of his death betrayed the poet?s secret world. Only his family, his publisher and a tightly knit circle of close friends knew that Ted Hughes, the British poet laureate and by common consent one of the 20th century?s greatest writers, had cancer and had been struggling reclusively with it for 18 months. Finally, Hughes passed away Wednesday night at the age of 68, Faber & Faber, his publisher, announced Thursday...