The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:00am on Friday, 23rd August, 2024:
Weird
From the local TV news yesterday: "80% of the heathland was decimated".
So 'to decimate' means to kill one in ten. If 80% of the heathland lost 10% of its heather, that means the whole heathland lost 8% of its heather. That doesn't seem a great deal as damage to heathlands go.
This is one of the problems with English. 'Decimate' sounds a lot like 'devastate' so the two words must mean the same. The same thing happened with 'enormity' and 'enormousness'.
The word 'sophisticate' used to be a verb meaning to make impure by adding a foreign or inferior substance. The adjective 'unsophisticated' meant something simple and natural. This gave the impression that removing the 'un' would give an adjective meaning something complex and developed. Basically, 'sophisticated' took on its current meaning because it sounds sophisticated.
Give it another few thousand years and English will be a series of grunts representing emotions.
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Copyright © 2024 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).