The thing about these prefixes, these negation prefixes, we have more than we think.
If we grew up speaking English, we kind of take these things for granted.
There are so many words that have very specific Roman meanings in English.
Coming up on Word Matters,
decimating the decimate dictate and the different semantic territory covered by uninvite and disinvite.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amin Shea,
Peter Sakalowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
Some people care so deeply about how a particular word should and should not be used that they allow relationships to be decimated when someone fails to follow their linguistic strictures.
Ammon relays the tale of just such a decimation.
This one over the word decimate itself.
We spend a lot of time at Merriam-Webster,
not just researching words and the meanings of words and the way that they're used,
but also we spend a lot of time researching people's perceptions of words and how they feel about usage.
Occasionally grammar as well.
And so we come across a lot of heated discussions of words and a lot of strongly held opinions and sometimes these are people disagreeing with us and sometimes they're people who agree with us sometimes they're Angering and sometimes they're just kind of funny and I have to say my favorite one that I ever came across I think was in looking at how people feel about the word decimate I came across the post on Twitter.
It was posted July of 2015 and the hashtag was Got dumped
because and people are obviously explaining why they got dumped and this worthy grammarian says got dumped
because I insisted she learned that decimate means to reduce by one tenth.
It doesn't mean wiped out vicky vicky if you're out there.