We understood that to “decimate” meant to kill one in 10

Posted on July 29, 2017 by adrianstenton

This is a quotation from a new book, The Beast, by Alexander Starritt, due out on 7 September, and previewed in today’s Guardian by Ian Jack, about a fictionalised sub-editor on the Daily Mail. It might make entertaining reading!

The Beast by Alexander Starritt

About adrianstenton

Adrian Stenton is a PhD candidate at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics and is currently investigating number concord in the species noun phrase. Adrian is part of the project Bridging the Unbridgeable: linguists, prescriptivists and the general public, which is supervised by Prof Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade.
This entry was posted in news, usage features and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to We understood that to “decimate” meant to kill one in 10

  1. Ingrid Tieken says:
    August 1, 2017 at 9:31 am

    And it is one of the usage problems dealt with in the HUGE database.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s