Posted on 09/25/2016 7:31:10 AM PDT by Leaning Right
All have the potential to be good and decent, it's the islam that prevents it.
Actually, the original definition (1528) was to levy the tithe (10% religious tax). According to the Oxford Dictionaries:
Decimation appears to be a slightly older word in English than the verb as it began to make an appearance in English writing in the early 16th century, some seventy years prior to decimate. Again, recent research can provide an earlier example than the current unrevised OED entry. It appears in a book by William Barlow, printed in 1528, where he writes ‘To forge excommunicacions For tythes and decimacions Is their continuall exercyse.’
If we look to the dictionaries of this time period the evidence suggests that this tithing sense of decimate was just as common, if not more so, as the sense of killing or punishing one of every ten. The first English dictionary to record the word was Thomas Blount’s magnificently titled Glossographia, published in 1656, which defines decimate as “to take the tenth, to gather the Tyth”, with no mention made of killing anyone, soldiers or otherwise. In Elisha Coles’ An English Dictionary, published some twenty years later, it is defined as both ‘to tythe or take the tent’ and ‘also punishing every tenth man’. These are the only two dictionaries of the 17th century to define decimate (which is not terribly surprising, as there were very few such reference works at the time).
Ah! Thanks.
Hard to beat the OED for word origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)
But, apparently, it can be done...
Oh, sorry. I wasn’t aware that I had to run all my posts past you first. Perhaps you bought Free Republic from JR, and I just missed that news.
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I was having a bad morning and almost posted such after my reply. I apologize for being over the top with my response.
Your apology is most certainly accepted. And I thank you for getting back to me the way you did.
I can only hope that the next time I mess up somewhere (and it won’t be long), I’ll correct course as graciously as you did.
Regards,
LR
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