2022-02-02
ศัพท์ น่าสับสน - Set – D – decimate & annihilate & slaughter
แนะนำการใช้ ตามที่ส่วนใหญ่ใช้ แต่ละท้องถิ่น
ความหมาย อาจผันแปร ตาม ตำแหน่ง/หน้าที่ ในประโยค
Dictionary.com:
ออกเสียง decimate = “DES-uh-meyt”
ออกเสียง annihilate = “uh-NAHY-uh-leyt”
ออกเสียง slaughter = “SLAW-ter”
Common Errors in English Usage Dictionary
decimate & annihilate & slaughter
This comes under the heading of the truly picky.
Despite the fact that most dictionaries have caved in,
some of us still remember that
when the Romans killed one out of every ten (decem) soldiers
in a rebellious group as an example to the others,
they decimated them.
People sensitive to the roots of words
are uncomfortably reminded of that ten percent figure
when they see the word used instead
to mean “annihilate,” “obliterate,” etc.
You can usually get away with
using “decimate” to mean “drastically reduce in numbers,”
but you’re taking a bigger risk when you use it to mean “utterly wipe out.”
Abused, Confused, & Misused Words by Mary Embree:
decimate
= to destroy a great number or proportion of:
Cholera decimated the city’s population;
= to select by lot and kill every tenth person
Not to be confused with:
destroy
= demolish; ruin; annihilate;
= kill, slay; defeat completely:
They will destroy the entire village.
Dictionary.com:
ORIGIN OF DECIMATE
First recorded in 1590–1600; from Latin decimātus,
past participle of decimāre “to punish every tenth man chosen by lot,” verbal derivative of decimus “tenth,” derivative of decem “ten”;
HISTORICAL USAGE OF DECIMATE
The earliest English sense of decimate
is “to select by lot and execute every tenth soldier of (a unit).”
The extended senses
“to destroy a great proportion of; greatly reduce or damage”
have been criticized on etymological grounds,
although these usages are common in standard English:
Cholera decimated the urban population.
Because the etymological sense of one-tenth remains to some extent,
decimate is not ordinarily used with exact fractions or percentages:
Drought has destroyed (not decimated ) nearly 80 percent of the cattle.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
Did you know?
The connection between decimate
and the number ten harks back to
a brutal practice of the army of ancient Rome.
A unit that was guilty of a severe crime (such as mutiny)
was punished by the selection and execution of one-tenth of its soldiers, thereby scaring the remaining nine-tenths into obedience.
It's no surprise that the word for this practice came from
Latin decem, meaning "ten."
From this root we also get our words decimal and decade,
as well as December,
so named because
it was originally the tenth month of the calendar
before the addition of January and February.
In its extended uses,
decimate strayed from its "tenth" meaning
and nowadays refers to the act of destroying
or damaging a great quantity or large part of something.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
Words You Love to Hate
Decimate
A strict fidelity to the definitions intended by
Roman military commanders of yore
may seem like an odd hill to die on,
but the people who insist decimate should only mean
“to select by lot and kill every tenth man of”
are willing to die on this hill.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
If You Like to Complain About 'Decimate'.
The English language is filled with words which have changed meaning, or taken on new shades of meaning;
decimate is just one of thousands of words
which have dropped a sense, and insisting that
those who fail to observe this obsolete sense do so in error
tends to mark you as an irritating pedant,
rather than as a dutiful historian of language.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
Usage Notes
When Words Stray from Their Roots
Should 'awesome' only be used to mean "inspiring awe"?
Imagine the following scenario:
you're at a dinner party, or some other such social gathering,
and are explaining to a small child
that December, the twelfth month of the year,
is when such holidays as Christmas and Hanukkah occur,
when suddenly you are interrupted by a fellow who informs you that December is not, in point of fact, the twelfth month of the year.
Many complain when the word 'awesome'
is used to describe things that are not, in fact, deserving of awe.
Yet few object when 'awful' is used to mean something other than
"full of awe." Isn't that awfully strange?
Since you have the spirit of politeness,
you raise an eyebrow or two and ask for clarification.
Your interrupter obliges and begins to explain his reasoning:
"see, the name December is based on the Latin word decem,
which means “ten,” and does not mean “twelve,”
so it actually is the tenth month of the year..."
Most of us, it seems safe to assume,
would at this point begin to slowly back away from the crazy man
with the rigid adherence to etymological fidelity,
making sure as we do so that
he does not have any sharp object in his hands, and if he does,
making additionally sure that the aforementioned small child
is positioned between us and said crazy man.
And yet, had the scenario been slightly different
—if one were perhaps explaining to a small child
the proper method for decimating the tray of cupcakes,
and that very fellow had approached
and explained that decimate,
because it comes from a word meaning “ten” in Latin (that same decem) was most properly used to refer to removing one tenth of a thing,
such as soldiers in a regiment as a form of military punishment
—in that scenario, many of us seem inclined to nod our heads and say "hmmm, you've got a point there.”
Why is this?
One possibility is that a word such as decimate
occupies a singular position in the English language,
describing something that no other word can describe,
and because of this singularity of meaning
some people are determined to try to prevent the word
from shifting in meaning.
It would be pleasant, were this indeed
the motivation behind people
who correct the putatively incorrect use of words such as decimate,
if only because the alternative explanation
is that we are awash with linguistic pedants
who are trying to impose
a series of capricious and illogical rules on our language use.
Have you ever said anything along the lines of
“kids these days keep using the word awesome
to describe things that are not, in point of fact, deserving of awe,
and boy, does it burn me up”?
There is a good chance that you have,
since this is a very common complaint.
Now, have you ever used the word awful
to describe something that is not, in point of fact, full of awe?
There is a good chance that you have,
since this is a very common way to use this word.
Why is it considered improper to use awesome
to refer to such things as brunch,
yet awful is, for most people, an acceptable descriptor
for the meal that restaurants use to get ridof all their leftover food that is about to go bad?
There have been a number of people
who have inveighed against this loose sense of awful over the years,
but their ranks are thinning, and most of us seem to not mind its use very much.
If you have taken these conflicting positions
about awesome and awful,
you needn’t feel bad about it (and you probably don’t);
one of the only things that is as resolutely illogical
as the English language is the way that most of us feel it should be used.
Ambrose Bierce, in his 1909 guide to usage, Write it Right,
stated that dilapidated “cannot properly be used of any
but a stone building,” on the grounds that
“the word is from the Latin lapis, a stone.”
Bierce’s admonition notwithstanding,
we seem to feel comfortable referring
to building made of wood and other substances as dilapidated.
We are likewise entirely comfortable
in referring to something splendid as fabulous,
even though the original sense of the word
was “like the contents of fables in being marvelous, incredible, absurd, extreme, exaggerated, or approaching the impossible,”
and the word clearly comes from the Latin root of fabula (“conversation, narrative, tale, play, fable”).
Some defenders of semantic purity have taken the position
that aggravate should not be used in the sense
of “to rouse to displeasure or anger,”
since an earlier meaning of the word was “to make worse.”
However, if we are to insist on a word retaining its original meaning
we would be stuck with only using aggravate to mean
“to make heavy, or weigh down,”
since this was the sense that the word first had in English
(it comes from the Latin word aggravātus, the past participle of aggravāre, “to weigh down, burden, oppress, make worse”).
Some of these shifts,
such as fabulous, make a certain kind of sense,
and one can easily see how a word might logically move
from meaning “resembling a fable” to “that’s really great.”
Yet there are a number of other words in our language
that have unmoored themselves
in seemingly inexplicable fashion from their roots
(such as talented, which can be traced back to a Latin plural
for units of weight or money, talenta).
Regarding the fact that December has a root
coming from the word for “ten,”
yet is occupying a position that does not quite match this … well,
it’s hardly the only month that doesn’t match its roots.
September, the ninth month of the year,
comes from the Latin word for “seven” (septem),
October comes from octo (“eight”), and
November may be traced back to the Latin word for “nine” (novem).
In the calendar used by the ancient Romans (which had ten months),
each of these months did match the number indicated in its name.
Around 700 BCE January and February were added on,
initially placed at the end of the year.
When these two months were later bumped to the front of the calendar
the four preceding months found themselves at odds with their roots.
When we consider the ways that people have complained
about the expanded senses of such words as literally, dilapidated, awful, aggravate, and talented
(the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge hated this word),
three things seem clear:
1) Words will often stray from their roots
2) People will complain about this
3) The English language will somehow survive
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language:
dec′i·ma′tion n.
Usage Note:
Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person,
a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions.
Today this meaning is commonly extended to include
the killing of any large proportion of a population.
In our 2005 survey, 81 percent of the Usage Panel
accepts this extension in the sentence
The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war,
even though it is common knowledge that
the number of Jews killed was much greater
than a tenth of the original population.
This is an increase from the 66 percent
who accepted this sentence in our 1988 survey.
However, the Panel is less accepting of usages
that extend the meaning
to include large-scale destruction other than killing
as in The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl.
Some 36 percent accepted this sentence in 2005,
up from 26 percent in 1988, but still a decided minority.
Dictionary.com:
SYNONYM STUDY FOR SLAUGHTER
Slaughter, butcher, massacre
all imply violent and bloody methods of killing.
Slaughter and butcher,
primarily referring to the killing of animals for food,
are used also of the brutal or indiscriminate killing of human beings:
to slaughter cattle;
to butcher a hog.
Massacre indicates a general slaughtering
of helpless or unresisting victims:
to massacre the peasants of a region.
Farlex Trivia Dictionary:
Slaughter
= fatstock - Livestock fattened for slaughter.
= massacre - Comes from Latin mazacrium/masacrium, "slaughter."
= slaughter - From Old Norse, meaning "butcher's meat."
= homicide, murder, manslaughter
- The general term for the killing of a person by another is homicide;
- murder is either the intentional killing
or the malicious killing of another,
- while manslaughter is the unintentional,
accidental killing of another through carelessness.
