November 1, 2006
Decimate
I
most recently came across this week’s
word of the week the other day while reading
about the Tigers beating the Yankees in the
playoffs (sorry, Yanks fans): the headline
was “Tigers Decimate Yankees”.
This sentence struck me because decimate is
one of those words that is never used correctly.
Perhaps it is better to say it has taken on
a completely new meaning since consistent
usage is what dictates a word’s meaning.
The dictionary may tell you that you cannot
use impact as a verb, for example, but there
is no doubt that people say things like “he
will really impact the team” all the
time. Decimate originally meant to destroy
one-tenth of something; the word itself is
from Latin and referred to a practice in the
Roman army. You can easily see the Greek root
“deka” (ten) in decimate. Now,
though, we use it to mean destroy completely
or almost completely. If you were to use decimate
to mean that one-tenth of something was destroyed,
everyone would misunderstand you and naturally
think you meant that everything was destroyed,
not just one-tenth. Another word that comes
to mind in this vein is “section”,
which originally meant one-sixth of something
rather than merely a part. This phenomenon
helps explain why translations of the Bible
such as the King James version, though written
in beautiful English, can be misleading-it
is not so much that archaic words are used
but that words we still use today in some
cases had a very different meaning back then.
September 17, 2006
Kandahar
For our first Word Of The Week, I have chosen
"Kandahar", which is the name of
a city in Afghanistan. It is a proper name,
so it won't win you any points in Scrabble,
but it has been in the news lately as we commemorate
the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Kandahar
was a home base for the Taliban in Afghanistan
until 2002. What is the origin of the name
Kandahar? Well, there are several theories.
One traces its origins to a kingdom called
Gandhara that flourished nearby in antiquity.
While it may have gone by that name at some
point, the modern name Kandahar actually has
its origins with the conquests of Alexander
the Great. Alexander named cities after himself
wherever he conquered territory-the city of
Alexandria is probably the most famous of
these cities. Well, as he marched eastward
Alexander also named what is now Kandahar.
Kandahar was an Alexandria, or rather an Alexandropolis.
The Greek language never penetrated far beyond
the administrative level in lands taken by
Alexander beyond the Levant. His name was
taken into the native languages of these areas
and changed accordingly. In Arabic-influenced
lands. the Greek Alexandros dropped the Greek
"os" ending and became Al-Iskandar.
The "al", which means "the"
in Arabic, was lost and, with some switching
of letters, the name became Iskandar, still
a common name in certain Arab countries. In
Persia Alexandros became Skandar while in
the Punjab it became Sikandar. So naturally
Alexandropolis became the City of Skandar,
or Kandahar. |
