Exceptional ordinariness

Newspapers should be concerned with the interesting, so why does the normal dominate?
ordinary people photographs
Portraits of ordinary people from the Caracas are put up by locals as part of French artist JR world project "Inside Out". Photograph: Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

Look for "ancient Chinese curse" in a search engine, and the first one that comes up is often: "May you live in interesting times". How has this newspaper reported our interesting times, and what has been reported as being interesting, ordinary or mundane?

Looking through the Guardian Weekly archive for a set of semantically related terms, I have found that, with the exception of extraordinary (2,976), they are most frequently concerned with the usual, rather than the unusual.

The most frequent is average (4,519), followed by ordinary (2,748), familiar (2,545), normal (2,421) and usual (2,183). Below this comes interesting (2,130) and unusual (1,546) then exceptional (698), boring (492), unfamiliar (277), mundane (262), tedious (174), uninteresting (133) and abnormal (117).

Looking at the normal, boring group first, we find that average things are: age, income, life, earnings, wage, temperatures, cost and pay. Ordinary, in contrast, is more human, collocating with national groups such as Afghans, Americans, Chinese, Germans, Iraqis, Israelis, Palestinians and Russians, and people, citizens, life, man, folk, person, human, women, men, families, soldiers and voters.

The familiar has more abstract associations: story, pattern, territory, faces, sight, tale and figure, while normal goes with life, circumstances, people, times, relations, levels, rules and time. In contrast, mundane is associated with business, explanation, matters, reasons, chores and concerns.

Is the unusual any different? Extraordinary is itself odd as it occurs most frequently with rendition, although also with life, achievement, circumstances and story. Interesting is found with things, questions, times, people and work while unusual partners with step, punishment, move, sight, position and event. Exceptional is rather specialised, and occurs with circumstances, leave, cases, talent, performances, quality and risk.

So averages and norms seem to be more newsworthy than the exceptional. And here's something else of interest: that curse I thought was ancient and Chinese isn't. According to Notes and Queries in the Guardian Weekly, it first appeared in a 1950 science fiction story by Eric Frank Russell.

Chris Tribble is a lecturer in applied linguistics at King's College London