onfocus

I think the phrase common sense should be phased out. I've been hearing it more and more, and I don't think it means anything. Everyone has their own individual sense of what common sense about any particular topic is. Someone can make an outrageous claim and call it common sense to give it legitimacy. Or someone can say they take a common sense approach to something without giving details about their position. Try searching for "common sense" across hot news topics and you'll find hundreds of results:

• gas prices (129 out of 20,023)
• social security (167 out of 24,925)
• judicial nominees (107 out of 4,482)

Maybe we could graph the "common sense" index of various stories to see where the phrase is being abused. When someone uses the phrase, I think of it as a red flag code word meaning: more investigation required.

Or as Stephen Hawking put it when I heard him speak years ago: "Common sense is just another name for the prejudices we've been taught all our lives."