| 词组 | decimate |
| 释义 | decimate The Roman army took discipline seriously. They had a practice of keeping mutinous units in line by selecting one tenth of the men by lot and executing them. We are not certain how much the practice improved performance, but its memorable ferocity helped carry the word from Latin into English as decimate. From Richard Grant White in 1870 down to the present day, numerous commentators have ridiculed or disapproved the way the word has been used in English. White ridiculed its use by war correspondents of the Civil War; another critic chastised war correspondents of the Crimean War. In 1941 the Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) criticized its use by war correspondents in World War II (and in 1944 took a slap at radio broadcasters too). War correspondents were not alone in taking their lumps; a poor farmer of 1859 was belabored in Hodgson 1889 for using the term to describe the destruction wrought on his turnip field by frost. And more recently, we read a troubled writer to the editor of the Saturday Review in 1971 : • I also grieve over what has happened to "decimate," though no less an authority than The New York Times has assured me I am wrong in thinking it can only mean "to destroy every tenth man." All of these critics have learned the etymology of decimate, but none of them have bothered to examine its history and use in English. Such an examination would have relieved the grieving letter writer above; decimate has seldom meant "to destroy every tenth man" in English, and then only in historical references. Aside from a few technical uses, decimate has had three main applications in English. The first, attested since 1600, refers to the Roman disciplinary procedure. The earliest citations note that the practice was revived by the Earl of Essex in Ireland; all later citations refer to the Romans. The second application, attested from 1659, refers to a ten percent tax and specifically to a ten percent tax levied by Oliver Cromwell in 1655 on the defeated Royalists. This sense is of some literary interest—Dryden, for instance, refers to someone as being "poor as a decimated Cavalier"—but it has no current use. The third, first attested in 1663, is the use that is criticized on etymological grounds. Labeled "rhetorically or loosely''' in the OED, it is the only sense of the word that has continued to thrive in English. It is an emphatic word, and probably owes its continued use in English to the arbitrary ferocity of the Roman practice rather than to its arithmetic. It is most frequently used to denote great loss of life or serious or drastic reduction in number: • ... the male population of the United States will be decimated by cancer of the lung in another fifty years if cigarette smoking increases as it has in the past — Dr. Alton Ochsner, quoted in Current Biography, October 1966 • ... hoping that Nazi brutality would serve to decimate the German Social-Democratic leadership — George F. Kennan, Soviet Foreign Policy, 19171941, 1960 • ... had survived an American ambush that decimated a group of stragglers he'd been travelling with —E. J. Kahn, Jr., New Yorker, 24 Mar. 1962 • The Voice of America has almost been decimated, its feature staffs and desks virtually eliminated — Daniel Bell, New Republic, 17 Aug. 1953 • ... high populations of gypsy moth larvae are usually decimated by the wilt disease virus —Massachusetts Audubon News, May-June 1971 • Though the buffalo herds have been decimated, ... this is still the frontier —John Updike, New Yorker, 30 Mar. 1987 Sometimes it denotes a reduction in amount: • When a brokerage firm is sued and fined for decimating a widow's net worth through excessive buying and selling—that makes the headlines —Paul A. Samuelson, Newsweek, 23 Sept. 1968 Often the word denotes great damage or destruction: • ... a severe frost set in ... and my field of turnips was absolutely decimated; scarce a root was left untouched—Scotsman, 1859 (in Hodgson 1889) • ... how parking lots decimated the downtowns they were intended to serve —Ada Louise Huxtable, N. Y Times, 30 Aug. 1979 • ... mercantile districts of cities are likely to be decimated by direct hits of explosive bombs or incendiary bombs —Horatio Bond, ed., Fire Defense, 1941 When used of localities, decimate may connote a considerable reduction of population: • ... the cholera epidemic which decimated Ohio in 1833 —Dictionary of American Biography, 1929 It is even used occasionally for humorous overstatement: • The mercury's caprice decimated the scheduled dawn services, but brought out unprecedented throngs for the traditional fashion parade —N.Y. Times, 10 Apr. 1939 • ... I instructed the furrier to let himself go, even if it meant decimating the mink populations of the world —Polly Adler, A House Is Not a Home, 1953 Sir James Murray inserted a definition in the OED, "To kill, destroy, or remove one in every ten of before the extended sense just discussed. He presumably did this to provide a semantic bridge from the earlier senses (and especially the Roman sense) to the extended sense, but he produced no citations to indicate its actual use. Apparently decimate has never been so used in English. • Although a few commentators still cling to the Latin—"To reduce by one tenth, not to destroy entirely" (Macmillan 1982)—most recent usage books recognize that the Latin etymology does not rule the English word. Many of them warn against "illogical" uses, such as putting decimate with a fraction or percentage. Our evidence shows this to be an infrequent problem. |
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