Mea Culpa: what will the Third World War do to our English usage?

Decimation, brinkperson, recurring news stories and a plague of wherebys in this week’s Independent

One of the most popular pedantries is that “decimate” originally meant to cut by a tenth, from the Roman army punishment by which every tenth soldier in a group was killed as a warning to the rest. The word is often used to mean “destroy”, which is quite different. As there are many other ways of saying “cut by a tenth” and “destroy” the simplest solution is never to use the word.

However, in a comment article about a possible Third World War between the US and North Korea, we wrote about “the decimated toxic nuclear winter that may be left behind in Japan and South Korea”. Thanks to David McDougall for drawing it to my attention. Here the word seems wrong in either sense, because it is being used as an adjective, possibly because it sounds a bit like desolate. Which would have been a better word to use.

Another reader wrote to query the ending of the same article: “President Trump … has no ‘good choices’. Let us hope he is a skilful brinkman.” Shouldn’t that be “brinksman”, the reader asked? I don’t think so. It is an ingenious back-formation from brinkmanship. The Oxford Dictionary does offer “brinksmanship” as an alternative form of the word, but I think it means someone who is good at being on the brink, singular, so there is no need for the extra s.

Same old story: I once compiled a Top 10 of recurring news stories, and number six on the list recurred this week. “World’s oldest man dies in Indonesia ‘aged 146’.” As Paul T Horgan wrote to point out, the world’s oldest man or woman never actually dies because someone else at that moment becomes the world’s oldest. He also points out that “these long-lived people always seem to come from obscure, out-of-the-way villages, where their paperwork might be sketchy”. But it is beyond the competence of this column to rule on that question.

By where? A plague of wherebys is sweeping the literary landscape, according to another reader, who spotted three in an editorial about social care on Thursday. “The terrible iniquity whereby someone who happens to die of a long illness is almost guaranteed to lose…” I couldn’t see what was wrong with it, and it can be more elegant than “by which”, but the reader insisted: “The iniquity has not caused anything; it is the effect.” And he contrasted it with the two other uses: “the smartest tax lawyer is yet to find a way whereby the wealthy can ‘take it with them’...” and “social insurance, whereby all in society contribute to the cost”.

Strictly, I think he may be right. But it makes it worse to rewrite the first sentence thus: “The terrible iniquity of someone who happens to die of a long illness being almost guaranteed to lose…” I read the original as meaning “the terrible iniquity which is that…” which I think is fine.

Structural surveille: We had this headline on a news story in the Daily Edition, noticed by Henry Peacock: “British spy plane surveilling Russian defences trackable on smartphone app.” I am all for language evolving, but “surveying” is a perfectly good word. There is no need to complicate English spelling further by adding a French style.