The phrase "a common failing of" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a frequent mistake or shortcoming associated with a particular person, group, or concept.
Example: "Procrastination is a common failing of many students, often leading to unnecessary stress before deadlines."
Alternatives: "a frequent flaw of" or "a typical weakness of".
(Social drinking a common failing of waxwings).
Yet I fear this suddenly-remembering-somewhere-you-gotta-be is a common failing of our time.
Except that Skyfall then falls prey to a common failing of many 50th birthday bashes: it allows sentimentality to cloud its judgment and loosen its tongue.
A common failing of NHS IT projects is that they often forget that IT solutions are meant to save the users time improve their situation, not the opposite.
More than anyone else associated with this magazine, Ross has suffered from a common failing of New Yorker historiography--to reduce everyone, and every event, to colorful anecdotes.
But while it provided a lot more laughs than many so-called comedies written by established playwrights that I've seen in my years as a critic, "All New People" also evinced a common failing of neophyte writers.
At times this can be very effective in dealing with the big-shot interviewee who is determined to appropriate the platform of the interview for his own benefit a common failing of the TV interview, and a situation to be found almost every night on the news.
His dislike of bureaucracy was legendary and fit with his sometimes contrarian nature, said Dr. Michael Witherell, Fermilab's current director, who has a handwritten note from Dr. Wilson that reads in part: "An all too common failing of large institutions is to fall into the bureaucratic morass -- complicated procedures, red tape and all that.
Two of his start-ups, Windhorse International and Spring Health in India, are aiming to do precisely that with products such as safe drinking water, biofuels and rural education.A common failing of people setting up bottom-of-the-pyramid businesses is that they do not start by building in the capacity to scale up.
How nobly free you seem to be of this common failing of mankind".
The Co. wants 50,000 instruments, and we doubt that it will have much trouble getting them; within a half-mile radius of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, there must be at least 50,000 telephone executives, all of whom suffer from the common failing of being unable to speak into more than one telephone at a time.
