{"id":10849,"date":"2008-01-03T17:37:40","date_gmt":"2008-01-03T22:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/01\/03\/10849.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:46","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:46","slug":"very-well-i-shall-only-decimat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/01\/03\/very-well-i-shall-only-decimat\/","title":{"rendered":"Very well, I shall only decimate them"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>When I was one-and-twenty, I probably would have found the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lssu.edu\/banished\/\">Lake Superior State University Banished Words List<\/a> wonderful. Well, certainly when I was seventeen. I would have crowed triumphantly over the banishing of <i>Let&#8217;s do lunch<\/i> and <i>infotainment<\/i>, not to mention <i>like I said<\/i> and <i>basically<\/i>. I was a stickler.<br \/>\n<p>No longer. My reaction to the discovery that they have banished <i>give back<\/i> and <i>under the bus<\/i> is that they are a bunch of out-of-touch cranks, and my reaction to the banishment of <i>decimate<\/i> to mean <strong>exactly what it has been used to mean for more than a hundred years<\/strong> is contempt. Ben Zimmer over at the OUPBlog <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.oup.com\/2008\/01\/decimate\/\">details<\/a> the fact that nobody uses decimate to mean <i>reduce by one-tenth<\/i>, and (other than to discuss ancient Roman slaughter and to bestickle) nobody has used it that way since Hector was a pup.<br \/>\n<p>I love sticklers. But I&#8217;m happier now.<br \/>\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which Your Humble Blogger sees the proverbial and changes his proverbial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10849"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18212,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10849\/revisions\/18212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}