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Decimate means 1/10th destroyed, lost, whatever. I don't care that the dictionary says that meaning is obsolete. I get that the meaning of words changes over time, but it has the prefix deci. 1/10th. You don't get to decide something that starts with 1/10th means near total even if it's a scary sounding word.
This is my anthill and I'm dying here.
My biggest gripe about it is that it should mean sacrificing a tenth (or a small portion) in order to preserve the whole.
So many words that mean completely destroy, and we have to make the one meaning specifically not that to also mean completely destroy. The language is weaker for it.
I have so many like that one. At some point in English one billion dropped its value three orders of magnitude and it is spreading to other languages. What now is called a billion it was one thousand million or a milliard.
More recently, one dude used the word hallucination for what AI do and everyone ran with it, there was already a word to describe that phenomenon, fabulation. Hallucination means something completely different.
If I fuck someone 10 times then havent i decimated them?
No, you’ve only gone and dekamated them.
I read a Matt Helm spy thriller where the hero knows that his boss has been replaced by a double because the real guy would never use 'decimate' to mean 'eradicate.'
Does English have sufficiently scary words that are also etymologically correct?
A population being halvsied just doesn't hit the same, you know?
"Those guys split us right down the middle, then finished half of us off."
Bimate removal of half.
Decimate comes from decimatus past participle of decimar removal of 1/10.
You only get to decide one tenth of what other people do.
Penultimate must send you into spasms as well
…how are people using penultimate incorrectly? Am I using it incorrectly? Does it not mean second to last?
I didn't even know it had an alternate or wrong meaning
Meanwhile I hear it used correctly maybe 5% of the time
Seems like we all have different experiences with this word
I'm going to guess, based on the pattern of other misuses, they use it like "ultimate", but with emphasis?
Yes
At least the dictionary still lists the real meaning as valid.
Do we have any other words where adding the prefix "pen" to it means "next to"?
Pen is more like "almost", like in peninsula, almost an island.
Penis
😔
I always interpreted it as "break into ten pieces"
It comes from the Latin "decimatio", a form of Roman military punishment where every tenth man had to be executed by his mates.
"You did poorly, as punishment we'll take away 10% of your capability" seems counterproductive.
From what I've read it was used to punish things like cowardice or mutiny.
It was super brutal, they were divided in groups of ten people, draw straws and had to execute themselves the one with the short straw using clubs.
My personal gripe in this area is people misusing "objectively".
Such as declaring that a certain movie or game is objectively good.
If an art work has been popular for years, has won dozens of awards, is used by experts as an example of excellence, isn't it 'objectively' good?
I understand your point, that a person might not like a particular movie or game and therefore think it's 'not good.'
I'm saying that even when you're talking about a subjective experience there are criteria that a disinterested party can rate and successful or unsuccessful.
If I don't like that piece of art, am I wrong? Am I objectively incorrect of the opinions inside my own head?
Lots of people dislike award winning movies, songs, and games. Are those people measurably wrong? No. The plural of subjective opinions is not an objective one.
You can dislike something, and still appreciate its merits.
Say I get a bowl of broccoli soup. Is the bowl clean? Is the soup the right temperature? Was it made with wholesome ingredients? I may not want it because I don't like broccoli, but I wouldn't tell someone else not to try it.
Objectively, it's a good bowl of soup.
See?
Bringing it back to the previous point: if I tried that bowl of soup and I didn't like it, am I objectively incorrect? I found it to be a bad bowl of broccoli soup because I like my broccoli soup a certain way.
If a piece of art was created 100 years ago and every professional critic of the time thought it was trash without any merit, and then 100 years later the critical reception of that same piece had changed and it was considered a piece of high art, is that piece of art objectively good? Objectively bad? Was it objectively bad 100 years ago and then somehow became good?
Good point.
But, unless you're talking about a hypothetical situation where the art was hidden away and rediscovered, the work must have had some merit or it wouldn't have lasted 100 years.
In this earlier definition looking for objective merit, it leans heavily on professional opinion. If a small number of individuals not thinking a work that is "objectively good" is good doesn't change that, then the opposite must also be true. Therefore, if we have a situation where the critical consensus is that a work is bad, and only a small number of people think it is good, then we have a piece of art that is "objectively bad" by using the critical standards, but which is held onto by a small number of people who disagree.
At the top of this discussion I didn't define "art" merely as visual pieces (I actually used examples of movie and games). So that art could be anything expressive- music, books, plays, movies, games, and beyond. I can think of art and artists not appreciated in their time, and then over time critical perception turned around.
This is all a long way of saying critical opinions are at the end of the day still opinions. That's why even critics disagree with each other.
This was an interesting exchange of ideas.
Thank you
I feel like when it comes to judging an artwork, saying that something is objectively good does actually mean "for the majority", because there is no singular point of absolute goodness to compare it to.
So even if there's a little leeway in the definition of "objectively" that doesn't necessarily mean that the statement is wrong.
I agree completely that people use it like this.