January 06, 2008
In other word news, it seems it's time for me to go off on another etymology rant. This List of Banished Words is pretty funny, so it's no fair to get peeved about their prissy insistence that "decimate" (originally meaning 'to kill of one in ten, as by lottery' -- from how the Romans did mutineers) hasn't and shouldn't be extended to mean "devastate".
But I'm surprised that none of the dictionaries (OED, M-W, Bartleby, MSN) I looked in had the very common signal-processing sense of decimation meaning 'divide a sample into, then eliminate a fraction of, many small slices". Google shows about a million hits for
(decimation OR decimate) (sampling OR signal OR MPEG)
and wikipedia had an entry, of course.
So the next time someone tells you that wikipedia is an unreliable reference, remind them there's more than one way to be wrong.
This is no 'filk' or 'cromulent' or 'jenk' -- it's a term of art that appears as early as this 1970 patent: "Each of decimators 310-1 and 311-1 is operative, as is well known in the art, to decimate the 10 kHz sampling rate by a factor of 25 so that the sample signal output of each of the decimated samples occurs at a 400 Hz rate."
Also of note: among the six earliest usages of 'decimate' in the patent library, only three do so in the sense of 'kill off a fraction of', and none in the strict 'reduce by 90%' sense.
any commentary at the super cliche' douchebag speak that permiates the meetings at work I attend?
I need help taking the lead at synergizing some whatever.
You need to get yourself some Bullshit Bingo cards. I think it's a good policy to wait til your options vest to actually announce victory mid-meeting, though.
or start referring to everything awesome as "steak sauce". . . . that would be a-one. (thx How I Met Your Mother)
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My favorite "the English language evolves; you can either accept it or be a dick about it" moment recently comes from an NPR story about learning Latin. Kingsley and Martin Amis did not see eye-to-eye on the usage of the word 'dilapidated' in modern times:
The father and son writers Kingsley and Martin Amis once had a good row about the word 'dilapidated'. Kingsley said you should use the word however you wanted. His son insisted on sticking to its exact sense: from lapis, meaning 'stone', dilapidatus means 'having stones removed'.
According to Martin, you should really only use it strictly - in the sense that a part has been taken away from the whole.
So Martin Amis acknowledged that you could say that the Parthenon was dilapidated, because the ancient Greek temple had lost lots of its stones in the last 2,500 years. But he wouldn't call, say, the Royle family's sitting room dilapidated because, although run down, it remains structurally sound.
posted by natedogg at 05:25AM CST on January 06