- Welcome to Ask the Editor.
I am Kory Stamper, an associate editor
here at Merriam-Webster.
In talking with a fellow hockey fan a few years ago,
I said that my team was going to utterly decimate his team
in the Stanley Cup Finals.
He pitched a fit,
not because I was telling him his team was going to lose,
that part was true in any case,
but because I used decimate to mean, to destroy.
Decimate, he told me, actually refers
to killing one-tenth of a Roman military unit,
and that's its real meaning.
My fellow hockey fan had fallen prey to what's called
etymological fallacy.
This is the belief that the real, or best
or truest meaning of a word
is the one that corresponds with the meaning of its root.
Decimate's root does refer
to selecting and killing one-tenth of a group,
but the word has developed other meanings since,
and those meanings move the English word
further away from its root.
Etymological fallacy appeals to folks
who think that English is on the decline,
but they ignore the fact that almost every word we use today
has moved away from its root meaning.
The root word that gave us nice, for instance,
means foolish or lewd,
but you don't hear people agitating
for a return to that.
And we should all be grateful
when eating lunch that the meaning of pumpernickel
has strayed far afield of its original meaning in German.
Is the destroy sense of decimate wrong?
Should you avoid it?
No.
But some may object to it.
But it's merely a hallmark of a living, breathing
and moving language,
and that's fantastic
in the modern excellent sense
and not the original based-on-fantasy sense.
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