Minor earthquakes are commonplace, major traffic jams more so.
For the 23 million people who live there, crime has become a central part of life, as commonplace as traffic jams and power cuts.
On Thursday, they were charged along with 13 other men — not on terrorism-related charges, but as defendants in a more commonplace conspiracy: trafficking in untaxed cigarettes.
When "Sex and the City," the movie, began shooting in New York this fall, the sight of its stars was both commonplace and traffic-stopping, breathlessly chronicled by bloggers and gossip writers.
Instead, it barely drew notice: in a country where protests have become as commonplace as a traffic jam, no one seemed to have anything to say about it.
In Baghdad car bombs, roadside bombs and suicide bombings have again become so commonplace that the traffic jams they cause provoke more comment than the bombings themselves.Relations with the Kurdish-controlled north remain tense, too.
The city streets are not called gritty for nothing, and if one symbol can be deemed commonplace on the walls, traffic signs, and general surfaces of an urban metropolis, it is the graffiti dick.
It used to be commonplace for victims of trafficking to report a lack of interest of the police in their plight, which, to her credit, May recognises as a considerable failure in the UK's domestic response to slavery.
Van Derburg is particularly informed on the subject: She travelled voluntarily to Thailand from her village in Myanmar when she was 15, or 16, at a time when sex trafficking was commonplace.
It is surrounded by commonplace elements of the city — traffic, baby carriages, row houses — yet there is no denying that the tiny patch evokes an entirely different locale.
