common-sense

See also: common sense and commonsense

English

Noun

common-sense (uncountable)

1. Archaic form of common sense.
   • 1850 April 1, Thomas Carlyle, “No. III. Downing Street.”, in Latter-Day Pamphlets, London: Chapman and Hall, […], →OCLC, page 83:

     In fact, such unfortunate persons have no resource but to become what we call Pedants; to ensconce themselves in a safe world of habitudes, of applicable or inapplicable traditions; not coveting, rather avoiding the general daylight of common-sense, as very extraneous to them and their procedure; by long persistence in which course they become Completed Pedants, hidebound, impenetrable, able to defy the hostile extraneous element; an alarming kind of men

   • 1888 February, Theodore Martin, “Shakespeare or Bacon?”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CXLIII, number DCCCLXVIII, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood & Sons, […], pages 271–272:

     This he unquestionably did not do, and yet we are asked to give a hearing to an American lawyer, who, nearly three centuries after Bacon’s death, chooses first to imagine that Bacon wrote the immortal plays, and then to assure us that, instead of placing the fact upon record as any man of common-sense would be sure to do, Bacon wrapt up his secret in a cryptogram, of which he did not even leave the key—a cryptogram distributed in a most mystical and bewildering way through the bad printing of the first folio, and which it was left for Mr Donnelly’s laborious and perverted ingenuity to discover.

   • 1891, Thomas Hardy, chapter XXXVII, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented […], volume II, London: James R[ipley] Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., […], →OCLC, phase the fifth (The Woman Pays), page 248:

     At breakfast, and while they were packing the few remaining articles, he showed his weariness from the night’s effort so unmistakeably that Tess was on the point of revealing all that had happened; but the reflection that it would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know that he had instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his common-sense did not approve; that his inclination had compromised his dignity when reason slept, again deterred her.

   • 1898 September, Joseph Conrad, “Youth: a Narrative”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXIV, number DCCCCXCV, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publication Co., page 311, column 1:

     He mistrusted my youth, my common-sense, and my seamanship, and made a point of showing it in a hundred little ways.

   • 1901 September 16, Pherozeshah M[erwanjee] Mehta, “Third Letter on the Land Revenue Bill. To the Editor of the Times of India.”, in C[hirravoori] Y[ajneswara] Chintamani, editor, Speeches and Writings of the Honourable Sir Pherozeshah M. Mehta, K.C.I.E., Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh: The Indian Press, published 1905, →OCLC, page 708:

     It will scarcely be believed that this heavy burden is sought to be discharged in a way which would meet with very short shrift in any judicial tribunal, or, for the matter of that, in any tribunal presided over by sound common-sense and judgment.

   • 1904, Carolyn Wells, “The Decision”, in Patty at Home, New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, →OCLC, page 17:

     Now I’m sure our Patty, being of proper common-sense and sound judgment, wouldn’t put the Elliott family to such inconvenience,—for moving is a large and fearsome proposition.

   • 1911, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “Margaret in Staffordshire”, in The New Machiavelli, London: John Lane; The Bodley Head […], →OCLC, book the second (Margaret), § 3, pages 168–169:

     Perhaps it helped a man into Parliament, Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and tosh; […]

   • 2007, Richard Price, “Tube Shelter Perspective”, in Greenfields, Manchester: Carcanet Press, →ISBN, page 66:

     I am breathing the breath of a gourmand, I am breathing the breath of vocal common-sense.