Decimate

I most recently came across this week’s word the other day while reading about the Tigers beating the Yankees in the playoffs (sorry, Yanks fans): the headline was “Tigers Decimate Yankees”. This sentence struck me because decimate is one of those words that is never used correctly. Perhaps it is better to say it has taken on a completely new meaning since consistent usage is what dictates a word’s meaning. The dictionary may tell you that you cannot use impact as a verb, for example, but there is no doubt that people say things like “he will really impact the team” all the time. Decimate originally meant to destroy one-tenth of something; the word itself is from Latin and referred to a practice in the Roman army. You can easily see the Greek root “deka” (ten) in decimate. Now, though, we use it to mean destroy completely or almost completely. If you were to use decimate to mean that one-tenth of something was destroyed, everyone would misunderstand you and naturally think you meant that everything was destroyed, not just one-tenth. Another word that comes to mind in this vein is “section”, which originally meant one-sixth of something rather than merely a part. This phenomenon helps explain why translations of the Bible such as the King James version, though written in beautiful English, can be misleading-it is not so much that archaic words are used but that words we still use today in some cases had a very different meaning back then.

Read more of Father Greg's Words...