The disappearing 40 and 10



On Christmas Day, my Colombian quasi-nephew-in-law expostulated that Australians don't know the meaning of the word 'quarantine'. There had been an item on the TV news the night before about something being held in quarantine for ten days, and it got right up his nose. Since he loves an argument and, if it's on a subject I think I know something about, I can't resist one, I took him on and explained that in English the word had long since broken loose from the idea of forty days and now signified a sequestration of any duration. English does that all the time, I went on patiently and perhaps a little patronisingly -- it takes words from other languages and manipulates their meanings to meet the needs, whims or even misconceptions of the passing times. He continued happily insulting his adopted language (which he clearly loves with a passion), and soon we moved on to other things.

Then today, in an otherwise impeccably copy-edited book, I read that
orangutans are the ambassadors of the Sumatran jungle -- jungle that is the 'lungs' of the region but has been decimated by two-thirds in the past twenty years.

Both author and copy editor must have nodded, I thought. Decimation, from a Roman punishment of refractory communities, is the destruction of one tenth of something, not a loose signifier of general damage. I tried to move on like a normal person. But my hackles refused to lie down: after all these years of arguing for this word's correct use, I'd found a manifestly literate person, someone who know the meanings of words, using it as loosely as ... as ... as we all use quarantine. Oh the chagrin!

My young Columbian almost-relative has the excuse that in his first language quarantine is inseparable from forty. I'm just a pedant in thrall to his high school Latin teacher, and I need to recognise that the language has picked up decimation and had its way with it. I concede defeat ... though I'm not completely discounting the possibility that the author will see the error of her ways and change that sentence for the second edition.

Posted: Sat - January 3, 2009 at 10:13 AM           |

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