There is an interesting contemporary use of commercial to describe a broadcast advertisement, and in some associated popular entertainment there was, from the 1960s, a use of commercial to mean not only successful but also effective or powerful work, as in popular music the favourable commercial sound. Meanwhile, however, commercial broadcasting preferred to describe itself as independent (cf. CAPITALISM and free or private enterprise).
Common has an extraordinary range of meaning in English, and several of its particular meanings are inseparable from a still active social history. The rw is communis, L, which has been derived, alternatively, from com-, L – together and munis, L – under obligation, and from com- and unus, L – one. In early uses these senses can be seen to merge: common to a community (from C14 an organized body of people), to a specific group, or to the generality of mankind. There are distinctions in these uses, but also considerable and persistent overlaps. What is then interesting is the very early use of common as an adjective and noun of social division: common, the common and commons, as contrasted with lords and nobility. The tension of these two senses has been persistent. Common can indicate a whole group or interest or a large specific and subordinate group. (Cf. Elyot’s protest (Governor, I, i; 1531) against commune weale, later commonwealth: ‘There may appere lyke diversitie to be in Englisshe between a publike weale and a commune weale, as shulde be in Latin, between Res publica & res plebeia.’)
The same tension is apparent even in applications of the sense of a whole group: that is, of generality. Common can be used to affirm something shared or to describe something ordinary (itself ambivalent, related to order as series or sequence, hence ordinary – in the usual course of things, but also to order as rank, social and military, hence ordinary – of an undistinguished kind); or again, in one kind of use, to describe something low or vulgar (which has specialized in this sense from a comparable origin, vulgus, L – the common people). It is difficult to date the derogatory sense of common. In feudal society the attribution was systematic and carried few if any additional overtones. It is significant that members of the Parliamentary army in the Civil War of mC17 refused to be called common soldiers and insisted on private soldiers. This must indicate an existing and significant derogatory sense of common, though it is interesting that this same army were fighting for the commons and went on to establish a commonwealth. The alternative they chose is remarkable, since it asserted, in the true spirit of their revolution, that they were their own men. There is a great deal of social history in this transfer across the range of ordinary description from common to private: in a way the transposition of hitherto opposed meanings, becoming private soldiers in a common cause. In succeeding British armies, private has been deprived of this significance and reduced to a technical term for those of lowest rank.
It is extremely difficult, from lC16 on, to distinguish relatively neutral uses of common, as in common ware, from more conscious and yet vaguer uses to mean vulgar, unrefined and eventually low-class. Certainly the clear derogatory use seems to increase from eC19, in a period of more conscious and yet less specific class-distinction (cf. CLASS). By lC19 ‘her speech was very common’ has an unmistakable ring, and this use has persisted over a wide range of behaviour. Meanwhile other senses, both neutral and positive, are also in general use. People, sometimes the same people, say ‘it’s common to eat ice-cream in the street’ (and indeed it is becoming common in another sense); but also ‘it’s common to speak of the need for a common effort’ (which may indeed be difficult to get if many of the people needed to make it are seen as common).
See CLASS, FOLK, MASSES, ORDINARY, POPULAR, PRIVATE
Communication in its most general modern meaning has been in the language since C15. Its fw is communicacion, oF, from communicationem, L, a noun of action from the stem of the past participle of communicare, L, from rw communis, L – common: hence communicate – make common to many, impart. Communication was first this action, and then, from lC15, the object thus made common: a communication. This has remained its main range of use. But from lC17 there was an important extension to the means of communication, specifically in such phrases as lines of communication. In the main period of development of roads, canals and railways, communications was often the abstract general term for these physical facilities. It was in C20, with the development of other means of passing information and maintaining social contact, that communications came also and perhaps predominantly to refer to such MEDIA (q.v.) as the press and broadcasting, though this use (which is earlier in USA than in UK) is not settled before mC20. The communications industry, as it is now called, is thus usually distinguished from the transport industry: communications for information and ideas, in print and broadcasting; transport for the physical carriage of people and goods.
In controversy about communications systems and communication theory it is often useful to recall the unresolved range of the original noun of action, represented at its extremes by transmit, a one-way process, and share (cf. communion and especially communicant), a common or mutual process. The intermediate senses – make common to many, and impart – can be read in either direction, and the choice of direction is often crucial. Hence the attempt to generalize the distinction in such contrasted phrases as manipulative communication(s) and participatory communication(s).
See COMMON
Communism and communist emerged, as words, in mC19. Their best-known origins, on a European scale, are the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels in 1848 and the associated Communist League. But the word had been in use for some time before this. The London Communist Propaganda Society was founded in 1841, by Goodwyn Barmby, and there is an evident connection in this use with communion: ‘the Communist gives (the Communion Table) a higher signification, by holding it as a type of that holy millennial communitive life’. Given the affinities and overlaps of the words deriving from COMMON (q.v.), this range is understandable, and certain connections were deliberately made by Christian utopian socialists. The overlap with secular and republican terminology, basically derived from the French Revolution, is also evident. Barmby claimed that he ‘first pronounced the name of Communism which has since … acquired that world-wide reputation’. This had been in 1840, but significantly ‘in conversation with some of the most advanced minds of the French metropolis’ and in particular ‘in the company of some disciples of Babeoeuf (sic) then called Equalitarians’. Communiste is recorded in a use by Cabet, also in 1840, and communisme and communism (in English also