Interesting article on the NPR website today. I knew that people mostly use this word incorrectly (not naming names but you know who I mean) or at least, imprecisely, but geez Louise… Back then it meant something specific, violent, and shocking.
‘Decimate’ means much more today than it did in ancient Rome
…
Michiel de Vaan, an etymologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, says decimate traces back to the Latin decimatio, by way of decimus, meaning a tenth. In its original Latin form, decimatio “meant to take out and kill one-tenth of a group of soldiers,” he says.
It meant something very specific — a brutal form of discipline, not a vague notion of widespread destruction, de Vaan notes.
…
Such punishment was rarely inflicted, but when it did occur, it was carried out with cold-blooded efficiency, Aldrete says. “They would have the group that they wanted to punish randomly draw lots, and every tenth soldier was then clubbed to death by nine others.”
The idea behind this punishment was that sacrificing 10% of an army’s soldiers was sufficient to create a lasting impression on the others, deterring future misbehavior without losing too much military strength.
…
My bold.
Is this the “warrior culture” that Pete Kegsbreath is promoting?
Maybe I’m just a pedantic classical history nerd but this is not shocking to me. It bugs me when people use decimated to mean just “largely destroyed”.
One random fact I just heard (or was reminded of as I’m re-listening to the excellent History of Rome podcast) is the Emperor Galba was deposed and murdered because (among other things) he decided to actually carry out decimation on some rebellious marines.
This was what my World History X teacher in high school, Dr. Broderick, taught me - the classical “every 10th person” definition - but I don’t find it very credible.
Why do you doubt it? That’s certainly something I learned at some point as well - to “decimate” means to kill every tenth soldier as a form of discipline.
It does appear (from a quick Wiki reading) that the earliest Roman traditions may be false, but its seems to have definitely happened under Antony and others.
Even though it’s meant this for longer than your lifetime? For literally hundreds of years? Does it bug you if people are quarantined for fewer than 40 days?
Words change meaning over the years. There’s a scene in the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie where Captain Kirk says something like, “I’ve got your gun.” to a Romulan. A friend of mine complained that Kirk used an anachronistic word like gun. It’s not like Star Fleet is using firearms, right? The word gun as we use it today doesn’t mean the same thing it meant in the 14th century. So why should it mean exactly the same thing in the 24th century?
It was probably a story based on an apocryphal legend but then the Roman Empire was around for so long that eventually a general who grew up hearing the legend decided to carry it out.
A few more modern examples have occurred as well, again because these generals grew up on stories about Rome doing it.
It happened in the early empire with Galba (who took the purple after Nero’s death so pretty early), as I mentioned though it was so shocking even at that point (and even though it was carried out for mutiny not just cowardice) it was one of the reasons he only lasted seven months before getting assassinated.
Gun is a broad church; it can mean spray gun, or water gun, or nail gun; the concept is not confined to firearms. The bigger problem with laser guns and phasers is how they retain enough charge to cause damage while still being hand-held.
And if they’ve got non-negligible energy conversion inefficiency, they’d almost instantly become too hot to hold onto. But the Rule of Cool carries the day.
I knew that it meant “kill one tenth”, but this is the first I’ve heard that the punishment was supposed to be carried out by the other nine-tenths of the decimated unit. That part, I do doubt, because the Romans weren’t idiots when it came to warfare, and that’s a great way to get the guy giving the order fragged. And forcing the members of a unit to kill each other is the exact opposite of discipline.
