Editor’s Note: This post is an excerpt from: THISday-Words for the Vulnerable and the Venerable by Philip Gabbard, a book of essays and *creative nonfiction.   Wordsmithing Past The Editor  Could you imagine if Mark Twain or Pink Floyd wrote ad copy today? Although, while  sixty-second ad copy wasn’t a “thing” in Twain’s day—he was widely heralded for penning some poignant one-liners back in the late 1800s, like saying that  common sense ain’t so common. But even Twain had his  influencers. Perhaps it was Voltaire who similarly wrote the same line a century and a half earlier. Then in truth, the fact that common sense hasn’t been, well, common has been common since AD 130, when the Roman poet Juvenal first wrote that there was  not a more uncommon thing in the world than common sense. And I can only think that that was something Juvenal  heard…

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