An Essayist's Notebook

I learned the word decimate in a school history lesson. I remember it well. Later, in an inter-school debating competition, I remember the pleasure of using it myself.

I was arguing that the proposal advanced by the opposing team was not merely damaging to society. It was asking people to participate in their own ruin. Rather like removing stones from the building's foundations in order to strengthen its walls.

Decimate seemed the perfect word.

The practice from which it emerged belonged to the Roman legions. A military unit judged guilty of an offence could be ordered to decimate itself. The punishment was horrifying precisely because it was collective and self-inflicted. One man in every ten was selected and killed by his comrades. The unit itself carried out the sentence.

That is what gave the word its extraordinary power. It did not simply describe destruction. It described a group compelled to become an instrument of its own punishment. Self-harm elevated to public policy.

Few English speakers hear that meaning today.

Ask someone what decimate means and they will probably say “destroy”, “devastate”, or “wipe out”. Dictionaries now largely accept those broader definitions because common usage has long since moved on. Language, after all, follows speakers rather than historians.

Yet something has been lost.

The older meaning carried a flavour that the modern one lacks. It contained ideas of complicity, discipline, participation and sacrifice. A forest may be devastated by fire. A city may be destroyed by war. But a legion decimated itself.

That distinction mattered.

So what should writers do with words like this? If you are writing for specialists, the historical meaning may still survive. But what if your audience hears only the modern sense? Do you continue to defend the older usage in the hope of preserving a fragment of linguistic history? Or do you accept that language changes, surrender gracefully, and move on?

I have chosen the latter.

This is probably the last time I will use the word decimate. Not because I have stopped admiring it, but because the meaning I admire is no longer the meaning most people hear.

So farewell, old friend.

May some future generation rediscover you, and understand why you once seemed such a remarkable word. David Marshall Sna Sceirí