Angry Hippy
Second assistant rock lifter at an almost off-grid permaculture commune-ish in Asturias.
Another reason that English speakers talk about common usage is the ridiculous number of words in the language:
The RAE contains something like 93k words, including all the americanismos.
The Oxford English Dictionary contains roughly 470k words, and estimates that only 170k of those are in common current usage. So there are VASTLY more words in the English dictionary than most English speakers have ever even heard, much less could use properly. I didn’t know that the word touristic existed in English until I i moved to Spain, for instance.
So for English speakers, getting down to the 100k or so most used words means ignoring 80% of our dictionary. So when we say something isn’t common usage we really mean something between “no one has used that word in 60 years” and “I had to go look up if that even WAS an English word”.
People are fixated on common usage because it’s common, and therefore, by definition, most likely to be unambiguously understood by the largest number of speakers.
The rest of this is in the spirit of modern linguistic nerdiness:
If there is a common word, it should be preferred over uncommon words simply for ease of communication. It is much more common in the English speaking world to say “a tour bus” for a bus that goes around a city near the sights to be seen, and while “a touristic bus” might be a perfectly acceptable synonym, it is less common.
The same holds for “salubrious”. While by dictionary standards it might be the best option, it isn’t that common, and most people would say “healthiness” or “wholesomeness” for salubridad and “sanitariness” or “healthfulness” for sanidad.
Source: USian immigrant to Spain married to a filología inglesa / translator
These products (have been determined to) have environmental, economical, and health risks.
There isn’t really a word in common usage in English that means “with respect to the matter of ones health” that can be used in that construction,so you end up with passive voice statements.
It’s the way they’re doing it that is the problem. There are already existing anonymous contactless payment systems that could be doing this in stores (from a consumer pov). The difference is that they don’t track you so they’re of limited interest to surveillance capitalism corps.
I just left a music festival where literally everything was controlled via RFID wallet chips on a bracelet. It’s fast and excellent. Festival entrance, area access (lounges, vip, backstage, etc…), food and beverage purchases, shuttle bus access, vendor purchases, even some taxis in the area, all paid from a virtual wallet I loaded with currency and not linked to my bank accounts or social media, or store profiles. Presumably they made a profile of my purchase and travel patterns during the week to optimize their routes and services in future, but since they have no way to tie that to ME, they can’t really sell off my data.
Rambling yes, but the point is whether or not the new low-friction payment systems operate as a cash analog (quick, anonymous, portable, loosely coupled to financial networks) or as a credit analog (non-anonymous, tightly coupled to financial systems, non-portable, etc)
Rock Me Amadeus - Falco
La Bamba - Los Lobos
Macarena - Los Del Rio
Despacito - Luis Fonsi / Daddy Yankee
99 Luftballons - Nena
Sadeness, part 1 - Enigma
Volaré - Domenico Modungo
Currently reading The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Excellent both as ethnography and as multivalent critique of capitalism.