1. You will have noticed that the link to box.net no longer works. UMass has transitioned to a different service, about which I have received endless incomprehensible messages. I just called the OIT Help Desk and they said they would help so if you are patient, my hope is that I will have a new link that will function. Otherwise, my life’s work will float around in cyberspace forever, present but inaccessible. Fingers crossed.
2. Here comes another crotchet from the old guy. Everybody,
it seems, uses the word “decimate” to mean roughly “totally destroy,” or
something of that sort. Actually, it does not mean that at all (I know, I know,
if everybody uses a word in a certain way that is what it means, but still.)
The commanders of the legions of the old Roman Empire had a particularly brutal
way of punishing substandard performance in battle. They would line the troops
up and put to death every 10th man (hence decimate.) This was not
supposed to destroy the Legion but rather to improve performance, and I rather
imagine it did. So please do not use “decimate” when what you mean is “wipe out.”
If I must be a reluctant witness of the untergang des Abendlandes, at least I will insist on a proper
choice of words to describe the disasters around me.
Here is my crotchet. Why is the word “requiz,” apparently not a word, since it is not in the Official Scrabble Dictionary, but the word “replant” is in the Official Scrabble Dictionary? Over the weekend, one of my best friends, who now lives in Arizona, visited me and we played our favorite form of competition, Scrabble. We play on the Super Scrabble board, which has many more spaces and tiles, and also has quadruple letter and word scores. If you enjoy the game, I recommend that you use the Super Scrabble version.
ReplyDeleteNow, I have a pretty good vocabulary. But my friend is the master of the 7-letter plays. Over the weekend, we managed to play two games. In the first game, I held my own, losing by only 24 points. But in the second game, I got utterly decimated (since there were only two of us, not ten, destroying me was a decimation.) He had three seven-letter plays (snacking, plowers and hoariest). Truth be told, I had some pretty bad letters (like all consonants). I thought I was going to make a comeback, when I played “requiz.” Challenge! Well, it is not in the Official Scrabble Dictionary, which makes absolutely no sense to me – if you can retest someone, why can’t you requiz them? (“Retest” is in the Scrabble Dictionary, as is “quiz” as a verb.) According to my friend, a retired high school mathematics teacher, he has never heard anybody say they were requizzing their students. I said, “I am sure I have heard it.”
At some point he played the word “cel.” “ ‘Cell’ has two ‘l’s says I. I challenge.” Well, no, according to the Official Scrabble Dictionary the word “cel” refers to the ellipses which contain dialogue in cartoons. At some point my friend played “replant.” “ Challenge,” I exclaimed. “If you cannot ‘requiz,’ then you most certainly cannot ‘replant.’ What are you replanting if it has already been planted?” Wrong again. Result? In the second game I took the worst Scrabble drubbing I have ever experienced. I am sick to report that I lost an ignominious 946 to 576. Ugh. (“Ugh” is a word.)
Look up "decimate" in the dictionary. Language evolves, Bob.
ReplyDeleteHere's what Websters has to say about the meaning of "decimate". An interesting article about how language evolves.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-original-definition-of-decimate
In signal processing, decimate refers to a filter that skips every so many time series. The examples I have seen, however, skip every other one, so the output of this filter would be a time series half the length of the input.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, this is a contemporary technical usage close to the original.
One of pet peeves (although the battle is lost; even good writers violate my stricture): using 'anxious' to mean 'eager'.
ReplyDeleteAnd don't get me started on 'beg the question'.
If we are to enforce Professor Wolff’s principle with respect to the correct meaning of decimate, then we’ll have to give up on century, too. According to the OED, century originally meant “A company in the ancient Roman army, consisting nominally of a hundred men….” This sense dates back to Late Middle English, while our benighted use of century to mean a period of a hundred years didn’t beset our language until the early 17th century—about the same time that century took on yet another meaning (in English): “Each of the 193 divisions by which the Roman people voted in the centuriate assembly.” So, I suppose that was wrong too. Professor Wolff’s line of thought about the fixed meaning of decimate seems to me to bear more than a passing resemblance to Scalia’s Originalism about how to read and interpret the words in a legal text. –Fritz Poebel
ReplyDeleteAs a child I thought the most puzzling bit of English was the seeming synonymy in usage of the phrases "I couldn't care less" and "I could care less." And further, both allegedly asserted that the speaker's interest was pretty much nil (i.e. COULDN'T care less), but it always struck me that the vehemence with which the assertions were made indicated that the speaker actually did care. The final twist is that both phrases are typically unambiguous in the context of their actual use.
ReplyDeleteTo make a point I have made before, some of the stuff on language on this blog is just comical. It is as if linguists don't exist.
ReplyDeleteAnswer: 8. Question: How many comments until someone comments that the commentators don't know what they're commenting about?
ReplyDeleteI was actually referring to Wolff, John Rapko, and there is certainly no need to be so silly-cute.
ReplyDelete