decimate

[thanate]

For troyfish and grauwulf and anyone else liable to find it interesting: (and my computer dictionary is mean and won't let me select and copy text, so this may be abbreviated somewhat...)

definition 2 (historical) kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group.

Originally applied to a punishment for mutinous Roman Legions, but became generalized as a punishment for a group of people, or merely to kill one in ten people (as in "the virus decimated the population") before being skewed into the modern sense of destroying a large percentage of something. Purists believe that it should only be applied to people, and one can not decimate crops for instance. Originally used in English to refer to a tithe, and later to Cromwell's tax on Royalists. (er?) Even in the modern skewed sense of drastic reduction of forces, it doesn't mean "destroy utterly." (did anyone think that?)

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So in other words, I am a bad classics major, and while I may have remembered my numbers right, I'd forgotten the punishment bit entirely. Sorry about that. (what was that I was saying about not listening to me when I'm wrong?)

Comments

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Yeah, everyone but Van Nortwick is new since I left. If it was your senior year, then it was the new guy who I met briefly when I came to visit and have no idea who he was, except that I think he went on to bigger and better things after a year or two... If it was before that, then presumably Charles Hedrick, who wasn't all that young really, but kind of looked it, and was on loan from someplace in southern CA because Jenny Lynn had just had their first kid the semester before and they were doing a switch-off sort of thing where they both spent a year in oberlin and then both went off to his school, I think. (I think they eventually actually got married after the advent of the second kid, also unplanned...)

[hydecat.livejournal.com]

It must have been Hedrick, since I remember him being attached to a female professor with a baby. And I think he liked Hawaian shirts. And had an informal lecturing style.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

yes, that would be the one. He was also prone to saying things like "we meet again, but your jacket is gone," when passing people in the hallway...