EDITOR’S LETTER
Dear Reader
In any magazine office, flick your pen and you will more than likely hit a word-lover, or at least somebody who spends a good deal of their time thinking about words. Perhaps, given our speciality, at Writing Magazine more than most. As a result, we were waylaid by a reader’s letter this month, in the best possible way. Our correspondent highlighted a perennial purists’ correction: decimate. As I’m sure most of you know, decimate comes from Roman times, defining a workaround to punish a group, eg a legion, without severely diminishing its number. So every tenth legionary could be executed, or imprisoned, leaving nine to soldier on. Now, the term is widely used much more loosely, to mean much or most of. Purist sub-editors maintain that the modern meaning should be avoided completely (and perhaps, in print, we might look for an alternative) but in practice, that would lead to a term that people obviously like to use falling out of use: beyond Roman military history there isn’t much call for a word that means ‘destroy precisely 10% of something’.
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July 2018
 
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