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I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle with "decimate." Glad to see there's somebody else on HN still fighting the good fight though.
by monochromatic 14y ago
I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle with "decimate." Glad to see there's somebody else on HN still fighting the good fight though.
- hnriot 14y agoWhat are you trying to say? The word was used quite correctly.
- nemeth88 14y agoDecimate means to remove 1 out of 10, so a decimated share price would have fallen by only 10%, technically. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)#Current_usage_of_the_word http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)#Current...
- eropple 14y agoYou are not even "technically" correct and I have to say it's really annoying seeing this come up again and again in every HN thread where someone uses the word. Even setting aside that, yes, usage dictates meaning in English, the OED has included the definition against which you rail for 350 years. You're wrong. And you're the worst kind of wrong: pedantically wrong. Please stop.
- monochromatic 14y agoIt's basically a skunked term at this point. No matter which sense you use it in, some subset of your readers is going to take umbrage. There are other, better, words available that can take its place.
- eropple 14y agoThere are better words, sure, but if you're going to be That Guy Who Literally-Literally Everyone Hates And Nobody Wants To Ever Talk To...be right. Because, I mean, if you're going to be That Guy etc. etc., being right is close to the only thing you've got left.
- monochromatic 14y agoI'm not saying I'd bring this up in casual conversation. Just that it's a word I personally choose not to use in my writing.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- arrrg 14y agoIt used to mean that. A long, long time ago. Not for several centuries. Now, don’t get me wrong, the etymology of words is intensely interesting. It always makes me happy to learn how words were originally used and how that meaning changed – but all that doesn’t help you decide what a word actually means right now.
- monochromatic 14y agoThe fact that people still argue argue about the only-several-centuries-old newfangled meaning of this word signifies to me that I probably shouldn't use it in my writing. If I use it to mean "reduce by one tenth" most of my readers will be confused; if I use it to mean "destroy," a vocal minority will be annoyed.
- arrrg 14y agoUhm, no you do not get to move the goal posts. Argue against using the word. Don’t dare argue that it has a different meaning than it actually has. Also, I think I will increase my use of decimate. If it pisses off those annoying pedants (who are perfectly aware of what is being communicated and won’t be the slightest bit confused) I will be happy. I successfully communicated and pissed off people I don’t like. Yay!
- monochromatic 14y ago> people I don’t like But I like you...
- chimeracoder 14y ago> I successfully communicated and pissed off people I don’t like. Yay! You'll make a lot of friends with that attitude.
- arrrg 14y agoOh, I don’t want to be friends with people who are pedants about stuff like this.
- michaelhoffman 14y agoThe battle was lost hundreds of years before you were born. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first quotation for the loose "to destroy or remove a large proportion of" meaning of "decimate" in 1663.
- monochromatic 14y agoYeah, I know. It still strikes me as an odd usage though.
- lostlogin 14y agoPacificly, schedule a biannual renumeration review. Uttered near me. My happiness was decimated (modern usage).
- monochromatic 14y agoLinguo... IS dead.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mistercow 14y agoThat's incorrect. You seem to have some misconceptions about how decimation was used by the Romans. They did not use it on their enemies. Rather, it was used on their own military units as a disciplinary measure (usually in response to mutiny). And the way it was administered was not to pick the strongest men. Instead, they used a lottery system like drawing lots to choose which 10% would be killed. Since it was a form of military punishment, it would not have made sense to kill the strongest men. That would have reduced the deterrent effect, and also would have unnecessarily crippled that unit. Since the whole point of the practice was as a replacement for executing the entire mutinous unit, it would have been absurd to do so by destroying the cream of the crop.
- recursive 14y agoWhat's the battle? I'm seeing two definitions: 1. Kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage of. 2. Drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something): "plant viruses that can decimate yields".
- monochromatic 14y agoThe battle is that usage 2 is relatively young (being only a few hundred years old), and some people object to it. Lots of words change meanings, and hundreds of years is usually enough time for a new meaning to become totally unobjectionable. But I think the main issue here is that the word so clearly derives from the Latin for "ten" that it just sticks out like a sore thumb.
- tedunangst 14y agoEnglish is not Latin. Please, just accept this. The Spanish word diezmar, shockingly enough, also means to destroy (or cut by a tenth), even though it looks like it's got a ten in there, too.
- monochromatic 14y agoAnd I bet that word sounds odd to some native Spanish speakers, and they object to it on etymological grounds. Just like decimate.
- riffraff 14y agothe italian word "decimare" also means both
- latinohere 14y agoI'm a 35 year old latin and I have never, ever heard anybody use that word, not on TV, not on books, not on nothing. I had to look it up too see if it was real. Is a weird word, please don't use. Diesmo, on the other hand is quite common and I guess you can say that diesmar is the act of giving the tenth of your profits to the church. Still, diezmar is a dead word. Instead we use decimo for tenth and decimar for destroy.
- koide 14y agoNow that your position has been decimated by history, you could focus your efforts on one of my pet peeves that's been appearing a lot on HN: "binary blob" Type either "blob" or "binary lob." PLEASE!
- jcurbo 14y agoWhat? The b in blob does not stand for binary.
- kijiki 14y agoBinary Large OBject.
- kijiki 14y agoSee also: CLOB: Character Large OBject. Most (traditional) relational database servers do not support arbitrary sized (often >255 bytes) fields in a single row. The solution was to have a separate Large OBject heap, and store references to those LOBs in the actual rows. Starkey claims that he invented the term, and that the acronym is actually a backronym. I've heard conflicting stories on that score.
- tedunangst 14y agoHe invented a word in use since the 15th century? Wowza.
- ars 14y agoIt does. But I'm kinda curious what you thought it stood for?
- tedunangst 14y agoThat's like asking, what does the c in curious stand for?
- jcurbo 14y ago