Conquer Club

Language changes all the time. Some changes really are chaotic, and disruptive. Take decimate, a prescriptivist shibboleth. It comes from the old Roman practice of punishing a mutinous legion by killing every 10th soldier (hence that deci­- root). Now we don’t often need a word for destroying exactly a 10th of something – this is the ‘etymological fallacy’, the idea that a word must mean exactly what its component roots indicate. But it is useful to have a word that means to destroy a sizeable proportion of something. Yet many people have extended the meaning of decimate until now it means something approaching ‘to wipe out utterly’.

Descriptivists – that is, virtually all academic linguists – will point out that semantic creep is how languages work. It’s just something words do: look up virtually any nontechnical word in the great historical Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which lists a word’s senses in historical order. You’ll see things such as the extension of decimate happening again and again and again. Words won’t sit still. The prescriptivist position, offered one linguist, is like taking a snapshot of the surface of the ocean and insisting that’s how ocean surfaces must look.

Be that as it may, retort prescriptivists, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. Decimate doesn’t have a good synonym in its traditional meaning (to destroy a portion of), and it has lots of company in its new meaning: destroy, annihilate, devastate and so on. If decimate eventually settles on this latter meaning, we lose a unique word and gain nothing. People who use it the old way and people who use it the new way can also confuse each other.

Dukasaur wrote:Decimate doesn’t have a good synonym in its traditional meaning (to destroy a portion of) ...

tzor wrote:

Dukasaur wrote:Decimate doesn’t have a good synonym in its traditional meaning (to destroy a portion of) ...

But it's more than lost its meaning; it's lost its context. Decimation is wicked evil but that isn't obvious from its name. It was applied to military units; men who have been loyal comrades through combat. You divide them into groups of ten. Now each group has to determine WHO DIES. It's not like you just pick out ten random people out of a hundred and kill them. The people have to determine who among them must die.

tzor wrote:It's a good example that words often carry a lot more baggage than just their specific meaning. The evolution of the context around the words is just as interesting as the evolution of the meaning of the word itself.

Quirk wrote:Merry Christmas

tzor wrote:

Dukasaur wrote:Decimate doesn’t have a good synonym in its traditional meaning (to destroy a portion of) ...

But it's more than lost its meaning; it's lost its context. Decimation is wicked evil but that isn't obvious from its name. It was applied to military units; men who have been loyal comrades through combat. You divide them into groups of ten. Now each group has to determine WHO DIES. It's not like you just pick out ten random people out of a hundred and kill them. The people have to determine who among them must die.

It's a good example that words often carry a lot more baggage than just their specific meaning. The evolution of the context around the words is just as interesting as the evolution of the meaning of the word itself.

Dukasaur wrote:I actually did not know that. I haven't studied it really, but when I visualized the process I assumed they just lined them up according to their serial number and took every tenth one numerically.Indeed it is.

The basic structure of the army is as follows:

Contubernium: (tent group) consisted of 8 men.

Centuria: (century) was made up of 10 contubernium with a total of 80 men commanded by a centurion.

Cohorts: (cohort) included 6 centuriae or a total of 480 fighting men, not including officers. In addition the first cohort was double strength but with only 5 centuriae instead of the normal 6.

Legio: (Legion) consisted of 10 cohorts.

jonesthecurl wrote:Good point. I'm hoping mrs thecurl can sort something better out.

jonesthecurl wrote:PS thank God for the NHS. In the US, these visits to hospital would have bankrupted us by now.