the.com/common sense
The sense everyone agrees is common, yet swears they're the only one who has it.
means The basic, practical judgment that lets a person perceive, understand, and decide sensibly without needing special knowledge or training.
from From Latin 'sensus communis,' a term in ancient and medieval philosophy for a hypothesized inner faculty that unified the five separate senses into one coherent perception — literally a 'sense held in common' among them. Aristotle discussed this unifying capacity, and the Latin phrase carried it through medieval thought. Over time the meaning drifted from this technical 'shared sense' uniting sight, sound, and touch into something more everyday: the ordinary, practical good judgment a person is assumed to share with the rest of humanity.
- not common
- requires years of experience to even approximate
- not sense
- often just untested cultural habit dressed as instinct
- coined meaning
- originally a shared inner sense uniting the five senses
- irony
- everyone invokes it only when disagreeing with someone else