It's a fairly uncommon conceit in television, although I know it has a significant place in theater.
While it is uncommon for divorced men to send flowers to an ex-wife, Newt owes the former Mrs Gingrich a big "thank you" after her strategically-timed interview with ABC, intended to ruin his candidacy, backfired.
But the Peterson case has revealed that such attitudes, at least in some places in the United States, are far from uncommon.
When stories didn't work out as planned - a not uncommon occurrence - one could be certain that the calmest person in the media storm would be Max himself.
I ask where his uncommon immersion in his work comes from, and he answers: I suppose its a desire to get it right.
This spring the photographer Dominick Tyler is publishing Uncommon Ground, which pairs 100 place words with 100 photographs of the phenomena to which the words refer, from arête ("a sharp-edged mountain ridge, often between two glacier-carved corries") to zawn (a Cornish term for a "wave-smashed chasm in a cliff").
It was not uncommon in Peckham, as elsewhere in the country, for people who had lost homes or businesses to express some sympathy for rioters.
Parker said complications from the "potentially fatal side effects" of the RU486 drug, which he said were "very uncommon", were too risky for patients and doctors, and the Northern Territory, with its "tyranny of distance" was different from other states where most of the population had ready access to hospitals.
Wetherell said students, or their parents, spending more than £2,000 a week – £104,000 a year – are not uncommon: "It comes with the territory of their families, they want all the facilities: the equivalent of a luxury hotel suite".
The nude body is primal, animalistic, and it is not uncommon for it to be accompanied by bared teeth or a war cry.
Quilliam asks her view of the experience of women in Indigenous communities today, where such tragedy is not uncommon.
