Words and Meaning—Decimate Millions

Words are wonderful, a vital means of communication for most humans.  They are powerful but often we don’t treat them with the respect they deserve.  We abuse them.  We change the meaning – at times because we don’t fully understand for some reason.

But before we give ourselves a rap on the knuckles for our mistreatment of words, remember that language is alive. If words remained the same, with the same meaning for all time, then the language we speak would be dead—like Latin. The problem is that the meaning of words changes over time, but some of us haven’t kept up with the latest contemporary meaning. Or some people may use and understand a current, an “urban” meaning of a word but be unaware of its original meaning.

This happened with “decimate”.  Currently most of us use it to mean “almost completely destroyed”.  Originally it meant “every tenth one”.  This was because it came to us from “decem”; the Latin word for ten.  An ancient Roman army conquered and decimated i.e., lined up those who’d been conquered, counted their “victims” and every tenth man was put to the sword, the rest enslaved.  Far from “almost complete destruction” of that enemy.

Two words that currently fascinate me are “million” and “billion”.  We all know they mean “a lot”: a million of anything whether it’s dollars, dwellings or the inhabitants of those dwellings is a very large number–a seven-figure number, you know, one with six zeros attached to it (1,000 000). But just how much? What does it look like if we were to imagine it? Hard to comprehend even though we casually talk about a house selling for over a million dollars; even though we hear on the news of a million or so people in some country or other…

I once knew of a primary school teacher in a small country school who was in charge of the “middle lot”: two- or three-year levels of seven- to ten-year-olds.  She wanted to give her class an idea of just how many a million was, so she decided to have the children collect bread tags to use for a number of aspects of their Maths lessons.

It wasn’t long before the whole town got involved.  Bread-bag tags by the dozens, the hundreds arrived, and were used in a variety of Maths activities, then counted; the results graphed, tabulated… and finally those tags were added to all the others in a handy, unused glass aquarium.  All were agog to see if that aquarium would hold a million.  Everyone hoped they’d reach that magical million mark by the end of the year.

It was not to be.

The collecting continued throughout the next year.  And the next.  By this time friends, relatives, aunts, uncles, grandparents from near and far, some from the other side of the country were avidly collecting and contributing.

After ten years that teacher retired, and the project came to an end.  The aquarium was about two thirds full and the grand total of bread-bag tags.  Not even a quarter of a million.

The point was made, loud and clear.  A million is an enormous number!

So, the moral of this tale is that we as writers need to take care when using words. Even simple words we use all the time can be misunderstood by the reader.

© Mary McDee 2024

Feature Photo: Welcome to France © L.M. Kling 2014