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  5. The usage of ‘decimate’ has changed. It used to mean killing one in ten Roman soldiers, i.e. to reduce by one tenth, but now it just means to destroy a shitload.

    Although it’s in that article, I’m fairly sure that ‘literal’ has changed, too, and is now acceptable as a form of emphasis.

    How about this one? ‘Wile away the time’ or ‘while away the time’?

      • Or, conversely, when someone says (for example) “These cutbacks are terrible, our department has been decimated”, I make a point of looking horrified and saying “What? You mean they’ve killed one in ten of them?”

    • Hmm, Poppy, can’t disagree with your appraisal of decimate. However, allowing literal to slip away under the weight of so many people misusing it so frequently, well maybe language does work like that sometimes, but let’s rage against its dumbing down.

      American English has already slaughtered presently (for which they already had several synonyms) and momentarily (likewise) while having no replacements for the subtle meanings they’ve lost. This is the real pity if all of this.

      • Alas language works exactly like that.
        Someone – perhaps in jest- asked on another thread recently what was the deal with flammable being the same as inflammable.
        Anecdotally, the problem was people using materials labelled as inflammable and believing them to be resistant to fire (Yes, just like Moe in The Simpsons). This necessitated the creation of the more intuitively obvious “flammable”. Of course, you couldn’t just get rid of “inflammable”. This seems a daft state of affairs and is chum to the sharks of pedantry, but it actually saves lives.
        Once the great majority accepts the looser definition of “literally”, when you stand before such a crowd and use the word its meaning will be as they define it.
        If your wish is to communicate the correct meaning of the word you will just have to find another way of saying the same thing.
        Pedantic footstamping will only engender useless confusion..

      • Re: the word ‘presently’.

        This is a tricky one, as the American usage of presently to mean ‘now’ is actually closer to the original English usage than our modern British usage in the sense of ‘soon’:

        [“Traditionally, presently is held to mean “after a short period of time” or “soon”. It is also used in the sense “at the present time” or “now”, a usage which is disapproved of by many, though in medieval and Elizabethan times “presently” meant “now”. The Random House dictionary dates the sense of “now” back to the 15th century—noting it is “in standard use in all varieties of speech and writing in both Great Britain and the United States”—and dates the appearance of the sense of “soon” to the 16th century. It considers the modern objection to the older sense “strange”.]

    • But ….. wouldn’t the word ‘decimate’ be completely redundant for .. oooooh … 1500 years or so if we’re supposed to give a nod or even stick to the original meaning – especially military ones? I mean how many circumstances are there over the years when we could say in the true sense that x was decimated? *pedant raises hand* ‘er, sir, I think you’ll find that in that particular battle the casualties were about 2500, which works out at a loss of about 17 – 19 per 100, and so to say that their lines were quote “decimated” is in fact factually and indeed gramatically incorrect’

      So adaptability has saved us a perfectly good word!

      • I suppose a more accurate modern meaning definition of the word would be “thinned out” rather than “wiped out”.

        And it wasn’t originally used in relation to a battle, but as a form of punishment where one in ten soldiers were singled out and killed.

        The very word “deci” is a decimal unit prefix denoting a factor of one tenth.

        So while the meaning has become more general over time, that “deci” at the start will forever mean the same.

        • Oh I see. The ‘thinned out’ versus ‘wiped out’ meaning makes sense as to why it might rankle, but it seems to me that ‘thinned out’ is as far removed from the original concept which seems to have been something like ‘one in ten were replaced with new men’. I’m guessing that when these soldiers were ‘punished’ the lines didn’t suddenly just drop down to ‘9s’ but the men were replaced to keep the old ‘deci’ lines …

  6. Think I would use most of those correctly. Something that annoys me is when “Here here” is used instead of “Hear hear”. And the other 2 internet chestnuts. “could of” and “loosed”…

  7. I consider myself a bit of a smart-arse but I got halfway down and had already seen three or four I’ve used wrongly. ‘Begs the question’ and ‘fortuitous’ being the most obvious.

  9. My two bugbears at the moment are “I’m good” – which is nice to know but are you well? – and the use of “amount” rather than “number”. I do enjoy Radio 5live but the number of presenters getting these wrong makes me despair. I realise that I am officially a middle-aged pedant but that’s just a cross I will have to bare (sic).

    • A recent Adam Buxton podcast discusses this kind of thing with Louis Theroux. They class “I’m good” as American, but it’s always been absolutely endemic here in Australia and it drives me bonkers.

      Louis came up with the perfect response when you ask someone “How are you?” and they come back with “I’m good”, is to say “I didn’t ask for your moral status”.

    • I’ve rather embraced ‘I’m good’ since I’ve been down here. As you say JC, it’s inescapable, not to say unavoidable. Time was I’d have been thinking, if not saying, none of your f***** business, but I seem to have mellowed.

      At least once a day, I’m part of a conversation that goes like this, in supermarkets, coffee shops, whatever:
      Salesperson: “Hi, how are you today?”
      Me: “I’m good thanks, how are you?”
      SP: “I’m good too thanks.”

      A variation is “How’s your day been so far?”, whereupon you just delete the “I’m”. It’s all meaningless, and if you’re queuing at the checkout your hear it repeated automatically over and over again, but somehow I don’t mind.

      Of course, if I said, “Well, I’ve just bought 4 litres of expensive paint when I was only supposed to buy one, and I’ve boiled the kettle dry and completely killed it,” (this was true yesterday) that wouldn’t be playing the game… the response would probably be exactly the same, though.

      • That’s true Mike. “I’m good” is inescapable. Just wait until you lapse into the rising inflection and everything you say sounds like a question. They you know you’ve assimilated.

        I’m not very good at meaningless small talk, so when the bank teller asks “How was your weekend?” I have to refrain from giving a blow-by-blow account and remind myself that she doesn’t really give a fig and all that’s required is a cheery “Good, thanks”

        When the phone rings, one way of telling if it’s a sales call is by their opening gambit. If it’s “Hi, how are you today?” you just know it’s someone trying to sell you something or get money out of you in some way.

        I’ve noticed a few Aussie expressions have crept into UK speech now. 20 years ago nobody in Britain used to say “no worries” but now you hear it all the time

  11. Shit, I meant best, not well, read on, but, ploughing on regardless, if you can be better, when asked how you are, surely you can also, if less well, be better. Me? Today I’m best, thank you.

  13. I’m one of those who believes language evolves, and I’ve raged against the cult of ‘pedantry’ on here before. But…

    I can’t deal with ‘can I get’, as in, ‘can I get a latte?’

  14. Cult of pedantry? On The Afterword?

    I think you must surely be confusing it with another website.

    You’re right about language evolving, Poppy. In this respect, I liked Mike’s pragmatism about “I’m good”.

    But surely there are some battles that need to be fought? I’d be interested to hear what English teachers have to say about this. What do they correct and what do they give up as a lost cause?

  17. Another creeping Americanism of sub-moronic proportions is when people show just how pissed-off they are by starting a sentence with “You know what?” followed by some devastatingly Wildean put-down along the lines of “just forget it!”

  18. JC when I’m asked “You Know What?” my response is along the lines “Cold Potatoes Ain’t Hot” -FFS why ask a person that?? When you are going to be told a load of old tosh that you are not interested – UNLESS – they tell you that your lottery ticket has come good!
    You Could always answer with “Dickens Is Known For doing a bit of writing – you know” – Another bugbear is “you know” NO I don’t, that is why you are telling me “that” in the first place – If I knew DON”T Bother Me.

  19. Ah, we’ve been on this roundabout a few times. My opinions is that it don’t matter how you explicate yourself as long as no one don’t misunderstand your explicature.

  21. I’ve never heard of the Hot Button cited in #21. It’s not a hot topic round these parts, irregardless of what yer man says. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone say “stanch” either (#44)

    I genuinely wasn’t aware of #34 – Parameter means a variable and does not mean a boundary condition, a limit. Correct: “The forecast is based on parameters like inflation and interest rates.” / “We need to work within budgetary limits.”

    • Yes, it’s mostly a US/UK difference. Over there staunch is strictly an adjective, meaning “firm”. Over here it’s a lot more common than stanch as a verb (although both forms have been accepted by dictionaries for decades). I suspect that British readers would even query “stanch the flow of rumours”, wondering whether it’s correct.

  22. I’m not quite sure what the confusion is regarding ‘cliché’. i.e. ‘It’s a noun not an adjective’. Do people really say, ‘The film has a cliché plot’? I’ve never heard it used like that.

    • Neither am I and neither have I. Possibly a function of the very brevity of the items presented in the list, as the examples are perfectly okay:

      “Shakespeare used a lot of clichés.” Used as a noun.
      “The plot was so clichéd.” Used as an adjective.

      So he’ll have heard someone using cliché (rather than clichéd) as a noun. Like I’ve read “a rye smile” and “he wasn’t phased by it” in the past 24 hours. Lot of it about, Poppy.

        • Actually, I disagree with him on this one. Absolutely fine as an adjective. What about a cliche Christmas tree, a cliche Italian, or a cliche defensive midfielder? All of these being basically synonyms for typical or exactly as expected.

          • There is no logic to it. There can’t be, or else Pinker would also insist that the adjective passé, as in outmoded, should be passéd, which would be silly. As is often the case, “correct” usage is simply a matter of opting for the predominant idiom, which in this case is, as he says, that if something is clichéd it’s a cliché.

    • I only found out recently that cliché was originally a printing term.

      From Wiki: In printing, “cliché” was the sound a printing plate cast from movable type made when it was used. This printing plate is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly, as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase.

  25. Footballers. When they go to media school they must be told that the word “obviously” makes them sound more intelligent and are instructed to drop it into every answer, seemingly at random, when interviewed.

    So obviously you’ll hear them use “obviously”, often out of context several times in every port-match interview. Obviously.

    Still on football. The pointless pluralisation of names is another weird one. “If we’re going to win the league we’ll have to beat the Manchester Uniteds, Arsenals and Chelseas of this world”

    • Yes, I find that Aussie “Look” a strangely aggressive alpha male thing. It has a sub-text which clearly implies “I’m a no-nonsense type of guy/gal who knows what he/she is talking about, so let this be an end to your pointless and frankly impertinent line of questioning”.

      Although I suspect it’s simply become a verbal tic these days and they don’t even realise they are using it.

    • Tony Blair used to do the ‘Look, …’ a lot with journalists and panel hosts. I guess he was told it made him appear more like someone on top of his brief and not to be messed with and less like a rabbit in headlights who didn’t really know what was going on. But yes, adopt that approach with the wrong person in the wrong pub and you’d be on your arse.

  30. Acronym. This is often now used to mean any old abbreviation. I know I shouldn’t get annoyed about this but I do. And the reason is that distinguishing an abbreviation pronounced as a word (NATO, Defra etc.) from one where the letters are pronounced separately (BBC, CND etc.) strikes me as being useful.

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