mutual, reciprocal, or common? These three words are sometimes confused. Mutual and reciprocal can both mean ‘directed towards each other’. Two people can be said to share a mutual or reciprocal hatred, if they hate each other. They can also, however, might be said to share a common hatred if they both independently hate some other person or thing the same other thing or other person. Because common has several other meanings apart from ‘shared’, mutual is sometimes used where the strictly correct word would be common. The best-known example is our mutual friend, meaning ‘your friend as well as mine’, a phrase that is now generally acceptable and reinforced by the title of Dickens’ novel and now generally accepted in modern English, whereas our common friend might be thought to mean ‘our vulgar friend’