If we go by the man’s own text, what was Caesar most commonly doing? Interficere? Caedere? (Per)necare, etc…
I suppose that would be referring to himself in the third person.
No, not really. Just imagine, like, Dr. Evil or Ming the Merciless shrieking “I will destroy you!”
I was terrible at Latin for 3 years in the 90s so this is not a hill I am going to die on (although that would be very Roman). A quick google search just kicked out a list of 33 verbs that can mean to kill in various ways, so I feel like there is room for distinction between destroy/stab/choke/pulverize/obliterate/eradicate/disintegrate/exsanguinate … et cetera.
Point being- precision can get lost in translation since “I will destroy you” and “I will kick your ass” and “I will defeat you in humiliating fashion in our next match” all can mean the same exact thing or mean very very different things. And transliteration doesn’t easily take into account wordplay and idioms that no doubt occurred but didn’t necessarily get recorded into writing.
I assume this is the list.
How many English words do we find in a similar list?
I’d say many of those are a bit of a stretch, but then so were some of the Latin words.
Here’s another list of the top 45 English words, some of which overlap with this list.
Here we are talking about literal destruction, the annihilation of the person being spoken to, just not in a specific physical manner. They could be obliterated with a nuclear weapon, a cannon, a death ray, a flamethrower or the subject’s bare hands.
This has been a great, educational thread!