Saturday, 21 October 2017

The Grammar Nazi is IN!

Let's deal with the word: obese. It doesn't mean fat or overweight. Obese is a medical term. There are different levels of obesity, but to be classed as obese, people have to be carrying so much extra weight, their health is at risk. People who are overweight usually don't fall into that category. But it sounds so much more awful than fat or overweight. And heaven knows, being fat, overweight or obese is the worst thing anyone can be these days - much worse than stupid or uneducated or a president called Trump.

Okay? Everybody got that? Though I doubt that the journalists and TV people who started us all off using this word are even capable of seeing the distinction..

Now for: decimate. The modern verb comes from the Latin word for ten. In Roman times, it had a quite clear military meaning:

- kill one in every ten of (a group of people, originally a mutinous Roman legion) as a punishment for the whole group.

A very extreme punishment, you'll agree. Certainly a radical way to 'encourager les autres.' Now it's just slung around, used as if it means the same as destroy, devastate or annihilate. It's misused so much now that we have journalists writing even more nonsense than ever: the battalion was decimated, I read in one newspaper article recently. But a battalion in the UK army is 300-800 soldiers and it turned out the casualties in this case numbered 2.

I always come back to communication: I don't get hysterical if I see typos or words misused unless the meaning is obscured. The whole point of language is to make matters clear.

As I hope this is!

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