Mea Culpa: D-words for destruction

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

Decimated, demolished, blown down or blown up? (Getty)

We asked this question in a headline last week: “Will the omicron variant further decimate the job market?” I can see why the writer reached for a more dramatic word than “disrupt” and didn’t want to reach as far as “destroy”, instead settling on another D-word that is unfortunately on the Banned List.

It is on the List because decimate originally meant to cut by one-tenth, so it triggers a particular kind of pedant who starts to mutter about a Roman army punishment in which every tenth soldier in a mutinous unit was put to death.

The simplest solution is never to use it, and to use a word such as “devastate” instead, which may imply less total ruin than “destroy”.