My wife and I were discussing at breakfast the words hansom and calumny. I think that calumny is more well known, but she disagrees. We’ve had this discussion over various sets of words, but I don’t know a way to settle this generally. Rather than poll friends or message boards, I’d like to find a resource that could tell me the % of English speakers that know various words. Does such a resource exist?
I know of no such resource. You would have to design a study that contains both of those words (not multiple choice) and give it to a random sample of people to find the answer.
However, I would love to know how the two of you settled on those two words. They are both incredibly obscure with ‘calumny’ perhaps having the edge in obscurity. My vocabulary is fairly large and I had to look up both of them. I don’t think I have ever encountered ‘calumny’.
The percentage of English speakers that can give the definitions to either of those words has to be in the low single digits at best (maybe much less) unless they are somewhat commonly used in a place that I have never lived.
A poll in IMHO may be able to tell you the relative obscurity between them but not the real percentages (a disproportionate number of Dopers are vocabulary geeks compared to the English speaking population as a whole).
It won’t give you the percentage of people who know a word, but the Google Ngram Viewer will show you the relative frequency of their use in books.
Looks like calumny is more used, for what it’s worth.
What’s your criterion for “knowing” a word? Before looking it up, I knew that a hansom was a type of horse-drawn conveyance (from reading about it in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and perhaps other sources), but couldn’t have told you exactly what separated it from other types of horse-drawn conveyances.
↑ ↑ ↑ This, however, I had to look up ‘calumny’ and I don’t think I have ever seen or heard it before.
Calumny is like slander, right? And a hansom is a cab, though I think that term is only used in Britain.
A hansom cab is used interchangeably with famous London Black taxi cabs.
As for calumny, one sees it used in UK parliamentary politics as a way of insulting another politician - its a way of saying that someone has lied without saying it directly , because saying this in UK parliament is considered to by ‘unParliamentary language’.
Use of this language can get a politician stomped upon by the house speaker - or even temporarily excluded.
An example of this type of use might come in a rebuttal to an accusation, such as
Accusation “This government does not care about the poor and weak”
Rebuttal " This government does care about the poor and the weak, this statement is a calumny and is typical of the opposition attitude to the truth"
Now the use of the word is not exactly the same as saying they lied, after all a slander is not a lie, but the intent is clear.
dictionary.com has what they call a “difficulty index”. It lists calumny as least difficult (“Most English speakers likely know this word”), and hansom as very slightly more (“Some English speakers likely know this word”). No indication how they arrive at this result - for all I know they might be going to Ngram viewer too…
People from England may use ‘calumny’ several times a day for all I know but this American maintains that it is almost unheard of over here. I would bet a significant amount of money that less than 10% of Americans could define it without multiple choices and would also go for the bet for less than 5%. I feel perfectly safe with either of those percentages if anyone wants to take them.
Here at the Dope, we all understand that we should attack an untruthful post, not the poster. So it seems like a good suggestion that “calumny” is a word we should all know here.
Your post is an arrant calumny, up with which I will not put!
Of course, using calumny (“the making of false and defamatory statements in order to damage someone’s reputation; slander.”), strongly implies that the statement was posted with malicious intent which comes close to attacking the poster and “making false . . . statements” would generally be regarded as an accusation of lying.
Better to simply say “you are wrong” or “that is not correct” than to flirt with the option of having a Mod swat one for breaking the rules.
Normally the best resource for something like this is just to run them through corpora databases, like the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and the British National Corpus. Google Ngram is limited because it’s only words that appear in published books. Corpora, on the other hand, include spoken language, in day-to-day conversation, and they are generally how a dictionary will determine the “difficulty level” that Aspidistra mentions above.
However, a hansom is something that is no longer in use, for the most part, so in this case I don’t know.
Indeed, both of the words in the OP appear with pretty low frequency in COCA and BNC–hardly a handful of times. (And we have to correct for hansom, because Hansom apparently is also the name of some kind of finance company, so we can’t count those occurrences. Google Ngram doesn’t allow for that. We also have to eliminate a couple of instances where it appeared on the NPR puzzle game, and was mentioned in the news as an item in a spelling bee.)
Anyway, in general if someone uses a word in conversation, and that usage doesn’t itself become problematic or the focus of the discourse, then I think we can say that person “knows” the word. My very brief, off-the-cuff perusal of these two corpora indicates that calumny is more “known.” People are actually using the word more than hansom, in more or less normal discourse. But that shouldn’t be surprising, because calumny still happens, whereas hansoms are pretty much obsolete.
I’ll admit to only knowing “calumny” due to Pirate of the Caribbean.
I’ll add to what I said above, however, that the occurrences are so low with these two words, that I wouldn’t even try to estimate comparative percentages of English speakers in general “knowing” either word, and that, for any word, Shagnasty is correct that there is no resource for coming up with some kind of absolute percentage. Even if we can clearly define “knowing” a word, there are just too many populations, of just too much variation, which can be considered “English speakers,” and the data we do have is still too limited for the numerous contexts in which a given word may be used.
After looking at (recent) fiction, though, I find that the term carriage is used 25 times more frequently than hansom, with the term hansom pretty much limited to “period piece” literature, like vampire novels.
For me, it’s the Barber of Seville. “Calumny is a little breeze …”
I recall learning ‘calumny’ sometime in my 30s, I had to look it up. ‘Hansom cab’ was at one time readily encountered in fiction, I knew what it was from reading and movies. I’m not sure if people growing up these days would see or hear it so much.
I think perhaps you’re thinking of hackney?
My immediate thought was that the OP had intended to write ‘handsome’. Orally, that it what nearly everyone would hear if the word had no context. Even coupled with ‘cab’ I suspect that a good many native born English speakers would still hear it as handsome. (A good-looking cab?).
The only places one might come across the word today is in Sherlock Holmes or, perhaps, Robert Lois Stephenson.
Calumny is somewhat archaic and used for dramatic effect - usually preceded by ‘vile’. Many native English speakers may well recognise the word, but only a small percentage would be able to offer a definition. That, however, is true for a great many words, even some in common use.
What, nobody reads GB Shaw, Conrad, Dickens, Dumas, or Stepenson (RL or Neal) these days? They all use calumny. Twain didnt, nor did Wilde. 6 of 8 authors I checked just now on my Nook use it, most of them many times. Dickens was the least user, only in 3 works, the most well-known being Pickwick Papers.
This American is woefully ignorant of “calumny,” but to me a “hansom” is only used with “Hansom cab” (capitalized “Hansom” presumably because it’s a person), which is a horse-drawn passenger cab.
When used lower-case I would assume “hansom” is a misspelling of “handsome.”