Angry Hippy

Same for non fiction writing. If people can see how you might make a living from what you make, they love to downvote it to oblivion. Guess we’re all suppposed to have office wage jobs all day and write fanfic for free at night. It definitely keeps me from ever posting about my writing.

I sort of got the feeling that self-promotion was generally discouraged on Lemmy.

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.

Isn’t that just a pergola with new marketing?