AARGH!
Posted on 07/09/2015 11:40:57 AM PDT by pabianice
Most people have a linguistic pet peeve or two, a useful complaint about language that they can sound off about to show other people that they know how to wield the English language. Most of these peeves tend to be rather irrational, a quality which should in no way diminish the enjoyment of the complainer. A classic example of this is the word decimate.
The complaint about the word typically centers on the fact that decimate is used improperly to refer to ‘destroying a large portion of something’, when the ‘true’ meaning of the word is ‘to put to death (or punish) one of every ten’.
There are several problems with this complaint. The first, and most obvious, is that language has an ineluctable desire to change, and there are almost no words in English which have been around for more than a few hundred years without taking on new meanings, changing their old ones, or coming to simultaneously mean one thing and the opposite (a type of word known as a contronym).
But the biggest reason they were revolting is that they were French...
I guess that depends on the meaning of the word immutable...
I now feel like I’m insane, but I was SURE only in the last 20years or so have the media switched these colors. I think to try to dissociate commie Dems from their Red leanings.
A couple of years ago, some ancient letters were found from a Roman soldier stationed in what is now the UK. The letter could have been written by any modern day soldier on a far away mission.
He wanted news of the family and for them to send him some clothing and food, like cookies and snacks, and complaints about army life in general.
2000 years and nothing has really changed in a soldiers life...................
That was a blanket I believe. Just as foot soldiers slung them around their shoulders.
In any case, as a person who knows something about horsemanship as well as mil history, I’ve never known saddle bag to mean anything but a symmetrical conveyance placed across the horse’s back or withers.
I had hoped the word “similar” would cover things. I meant selecting some soldiers out of a unit at random for punishment of the group as a whole, and to set an example for the rest. Unless I’m mistaken, Washington did something similar with mutinous troops during the Revolution. But you’re right, they did not “decimate” in the classic sense and it’s use was very limited and scandalous.
It’s that old chestnut: is it “8, 9, you!” Or “8, 9, 10, you.”
I hate it when pseudo-intellectuals say “begs the question” when they really mean “raises the question”, and when they say “apropos” instead of “appropriate.”
And I hate it when ANYONE says “snuck” instead of “sneaked”! I know I have lost the battle on that one but I’m still fighting.
“I based my statement from what I read in Mark Thompson’s “The White War, Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-19””
OK, thanks for the source.
“Very unique” doesn’t work. But if there were two of something, wouldn’t one of them be “almost unique?”
:)
You do know how it got that meaning?
The Bible book of Revelation, which means the same as Apocalypse, roughly, is full of accounts of catastrophes.
So apocalypse came to mean catastrophe.
The original meaning has been, I think, utterly forgotten.
The classical Roman punishment of decimation did not just mean executing every tenth man.
It meant every group of ten men in a particular cohort or legion would draw lots, and then the nine “lucky” ones would have to beat the loser, their compadre, to death with clubs.
A lot more traumatic to the survivors, I would think, than having outsiders execute one in ten of your cohort.
BTW, it was fairly common under the early Republic, but had become quite rare by the late Republic. If I remember correctly Crassus used it at least once against units that had fled from Spartacus.
IIRC, it was either in November 2000 or November 2004 that USA Today reversed the red/blue colors on their electoral map. This slight-of-hand occurred only a day or so after the POTUS election. Before that fateful moment, I think it was virtually universal that "blue" meant GOP and "red" meant Dhimmi.
Then when USA Today made the big switcheroo, others in the media mafia must immediately have realized the value of the deception, and they seem all to have fallen in line with record speed. Definitely a stunning psychological coup -- one that makes it harder for adversaries like us to taint Dhimmicrat lefties with their Marxist sympathies
Moreover, I gotta say I find it distressing/depressing to see how so many conservatives -- not only opinion leaders in the conservative media, but also run-of-the-mill citizens like FReepers -- have followed the MSM's lead like a herd of helpless sheep.
Anyway, those conservative pundits and commentators who refer robotically to GOP-leaning areas as "red states" or "red counties" long ago fell quite a bit on my scale of respect.
How about the word ‘rare’? For example, “It is an almost unique event for a woman to have quintuplets.” versus “It is a rare event for a woman to have quintuplets.” (Stats that I’ve seem show 1 in 55,000,000 births are quints.) If you had an identical twin, would you be ‘unique’ or ‘almost unique’?
Of course, that brings up another pet peeve, the phrase ‘unique individual’, which is often heard. Even worse: ‘a very unique individual’! By definition, an ‘individual’ something IS ‘unique’ or one of a kind, so ‘very’ adds additional redundancy to an already redundant sentence.
OMG, it actually has its own Wiki entry!
Look up “red states and blue states” on Wiki!
It pegs it as 2000! I was thinking I was crazy and it had been a bit longer than that?
A great find. Thanks!
AARGH!
See my #98
Genghis Khan was a bit more ruthless with his methods, he invented “measuring against the linchpin”:
“All male captives were forced to walk beside a wagon wheel. If their heads were higher than the linchpin (a pin inserted at the end of the axle) they were immediately executed... This technique was probably used to preempt against revenge attacks that were common between tribes at this time. If one tribe were to attack another, there was always the possibility that there would be a revenge attack soon after. By eliminating the older males, there was less chance of a counterattack from tribes that were in perpetual conflict due to centuries of distrust and robbery.”
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