While we are on the subject of fluctuating values, bear in mind that another way to tease the gripers is by being vague with words of number and measure. The annoyance a precisionist is capable of feeling when faced with this form of misuse is exemplified by the following remark, taken from the work of Wilfred Whitten and Frank Whitaker: ‘ “To a certain extent” means to an uncertain extent’. Does it really? The OED explains, in what might be thought the ugliest way possible, that this use of certain indicates an amount ‘particularized’ but ‘left without further identification in description’, and it gives numerous examples of this meaning, starting in the 1300s.
Griping about uncertain certains may not be as fashionable as it once was, but there are many people today who get comparably steamed up about the supposed misuse of myriad. The OED supplies a definition from 1555: in line with the word’s Greek origin, it explains that ‘One myriade is ten thousande’. In English, however, as the OED also points out, myriad has always simultaneously meant ‘an uncountably large number’, and not even the most defiant of pedants would say that a car valued at ten thousand pounds was worth ‘myriad quid’. No one would say that, yet keen gripers, faced with the remark ‘I saw a myriad of fireflies’ refuse to hear ‘I saw a great number of fireflies’. Instead they will insist that in such a sentence, myriad should be used as an adjective, ‘I saw myriad fireflies’, thus embracing the possibility, no matter how remote, of their number having been 10,000. Those same gripers would presumably also baulk at the report of a journalist who wrote, ‘Tourists from myriad countries all filed into the lobby and respectfully took photos of its interior from a distance’ (Guardian). By any normal measure, there are about 200 countries in the world. To a precisionist, therefore, this description must suggest in the order of 9,800 countries (and goodness knows how many tourists) too many, lending the description a hysterical air.
Confused? Yet more inflammatory to those who care about these matters is the sloppy use of decimate. Simon Heffer has strong views. After starting, ‘As every schoolboy knows’,** he goes on to explain that ‘decimation’ was a Roman military punishment ‘in which every tenth man was killed’. This is true. But it is also true that the first meaning in English of decimation, when it came into the language in the fifteenth century, was the taking of a tithe—a tax of one-tenth—because from the fourth century on, the verb decimare, in ecclesiastical Latin, had been used to refer to tithing.**Decimare is found with this meaning in the Vulgate, so that what St Jerome gave as ‘qui decimatis mentham, et anethum, et cyminum’ (Matt. xxiii. 23)—and what the Authorized Version would later give as ‘for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin’—Hugh Latimer, in 1549, in a sermon delivered before King Edward VI, could give as ‘decimations of Anets seade, and Cummyn’.** The fiscal understanding of decimate persisted in English for centuries; there is even evidence of the word decimator being used to mean a tax collector. But Mr Heffer, having declared that decimation is a word contemporary speakers ‘insist on wrenching from its correct etymology’, concludes that its ‘correct sense in English’ is the ‘reduction of a body of people by 10 per cent’. If that ruling were somehow correct, it would have been alarming news for the subjects of a sentence in Daniel Neal’s 1738 work The History of the Puritans, Vol. IV, in which he notes Cromwell’s resolve that all those who ‘declared themselves of the Royal party, should be decimated’. Helpfully for us, Neal explains what he intended by this: ‘that is, pay a tenth part of their estates’.
Those unnerved by Mr Heffer’s crushing declarations will be correspondingly glad to find lined up against him a noted historian, a great Protestant martyr, and one of the most revered and intellectual of all the Christian saints. Yet the fuss among our advisers about what decimation really involves is more commonly focused, not on who or what is reduced, but on the exact amount of that reduction. As some schoolchildren might indeed suspect or even know, in origin the ‘dec’ in decimate relates to the value 10; and yet for more than three centuries, decimate has been used to mean ‘inflict heavy damage upon’, with the tacit implication that, although the destruction of a tenth part might be pretty bad, the toll in question is vastly worse. Among all classes of griper, this vague but violent use of decimate is a source of despair, especially when the figure of one-tenth is directly flouted: ‘The number of wild animals on Earth has halved in the past 40 years, according to a new analysis. Creatures across land, rivers and the seas are being decimated …’ (Guardian).
But why do the gripers care so much about this particular example of a slide into vagueness? After all, English provides many other words whose specific values have been altered in defiance of their etymology, with the purist high horse nowhere to be seen. The noun journey, for instance, comes from the Old French journee or ‘day’, and in English was used from the thirteenth century to mean ‘a day’s travel’. As a measure of distance, the OED explains, this was taken to equal about twenty miles, so that ‘iurnes two’ in 1325 meant roughly forty miles. (A mile itself, or the early Old English mil, is derived from a Latin unit of distance measuring a ‘thousand’ paces.) Some time after journey’s travelling sense was established, it began to be used also to mean ‘a day’s labour’, making a journeyman a day-labourer. And journey would come to be used in other day-specific ways as well. However, from the mid fourteenth century on, the ostensibly tautological expression a ‘day’s journey’ began to creep into the language: the idea had arrived that other durations for a ‘journey’ might be possible—with what lumbering, imprecise results in current usage we know only too well. Imagine how much more incredible The Incredible Journey would have been had the pets made it home across the Canadian wilderness in twenty-four hours flat!**
Similarly, the original, seventeenth-century definition of quarantine—like decimate, a word ultimately derived from the Latin—was a forty-day period during which a widow had the right to remain in the property of her deceased husband. (The desert where Christ fasted for forty days and forty nights was given the name Quarentena.) But what of quarantine now? Can it be true that we have allowed its modern meaning to be dictated to us, not on pure etymological lines, but according to the rate of progress of a variety of deeply unpleasant diseases?
Even heaps started out as a specific measure, a fixed ‘heap’ size, before the Earl of Surrey chose to write, in 1547, so depressingly loosely, ‘what heapes of joy these litle birdes receave’. The OED credits Shakespeare with, all of a sudden, in Troilus and Cressida, converting loads from being specific to non-specific, when he wrote of the hell of ‘loads o’ gravel i’ th’ back’ (gravel meaning kidney stones). In 1575 or thereabouts, a lot, too, ceased to be used exclusively for a specific portion, when John Hooker wrote, ‘The next day the people, like a lot of wasps, were up in sundry places’. This particular corruption was still inspiring heroic resistance three hundred years later in Don’t, the 1883 manual by ‘Censor’ that we met in Chapter 11: one of its helpful instructions is ‘Don’t say “lots of things,” meaning an “abundance of things.” A lot of anything means a separate portion, a part allotted. Lot for quantity is an Americanism’.**
The tidal pull of vagueness continues, and has heaved more recent terms out of position, including a combining form from the 1960s, nano-. It is a fair bet that few of the people who now fling nano- about know, or would particularly care, that scientists dreamt it up to represent the value of one thousand-millionth: almost at once it took on the convenient meaning of ‘quite amazingly small’. Those, conversely, who insist on referring to etymologies will be arrested by the knowledge that nano- is drawn from a Greek word for a dwarf.
You might think that with all the examples above of early-onset imprecision, loads, lots, myriads, heaps, and so on, English would have no need of further imprecise terms of quantity. Yet seemingly from nowhere, the nineteenth century coughed up loads more, among them smidgen, scads and oodles. The word umpteen has suggested ‘an impressive number’ for over a century; then came yonks and gazillion. But if these six non-words are horrible, none of them is likely to be thought more horrible than three further examples that deserve a quick mention. We met earlier (see here) the term ginormous, coined by British servicemen in the Second World War. It achieves its sense of childish over-inflation by blending two pre-existing size-words with the same rough value, gigantic and enormous. Humongous (however one spells it) works in much the same way, suggesting huge with perhaps a dash of monstrous or stupendous. The OED passes the haughty judgement on humungous that ‘probably’ it is ‘factitious’, whatever that is supposed to mean. It was, even so, the very word wanted one day by a writer who cannot possibly be called lax. Saul Bellow, a great mixer-up of language, found a place for it in his last novel, Ravelstein: ‘… years went by, and it became apparent that I was unable to begin, that I faced a humongous obstacle’. Perhaps Bellow wanted to borrow a note of childlike defeat or awe.**Humungous and ginormous bring to mind a word that would doubtless be found even stupider by the huffers and puffers, and the only one of these three that the OED has not yet deigned to include on its pages: monumentous, a nifty blend of monumental and momentous. As long ago as 1890, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave it a whirl in the speech of a character in his novel The Firm of Girdlestone: ‘in all his experience he had never met with a more “monumentous episode” ’.**
On top of this wanton multiplying of size terms, there is yet another form of imprecision that disconcerts the gripers, namely the careless use of false singulars and plurals—which may sound complicated, but is common enough. Arguments about whether the Latin plural data can legitimately be used in the singular in English are so tedious that they can cause one to lose the will to live; and on this, even stalwart guardians of Good English have given way. Bill Bryson, for variety, takes a stand against treating the Greek-origin singular term kudos as a plural, but all in vain: ‘The Douglas letter concluded with a kudo to Justice Blackmun’; ‘geographical territories were mentioned for honors and various kudos given’.** And why stop there?
The bio-data of each personnel is duly maintained in the data bank.
An Unidentified Remain is defined as: A body of a deceased person or any part of a body known or assumed to be human …
‘I’m giving you ten seconds to begin clearing the premisis!’**
The grumblers will not grumble so much as storm at ‘a personnel’, ‘a remain’, ‘a premisis’. Yet, as ever, there are precedents for this kind of madness, absorbed by English centuries ago, that we more than tolerate today. Both ‘a cherry’ and ‘a pea’ are ancient misconceptions derived from foreign words that were already singular, cheris and pease. And the singular asset was born from a misunderstanding of the Anglo-Norman legal term, also singular, asez, meaning ‘enough property’. No more satisfactorily, the plural endings on invoices, trousers and tweezers were added to forms already plural, or treated as plural, invoys, trews and twees. What next, one might wonder, invoiceses, trousersers and tweezerzez? Perhaps not, especially given what we encountered in Chapter 1, the ‘illusive’ but greatly desired ‘perfect trouser’. It might cross your mind to wonder why, if trousers is to be pared back down to a single plural, the r should be left on the end, instead of the spelling being trews, or, to conform to modern norms, trouse. But then this whole area is a muddle. Why, for example, does Marks and Spencer, selling singular knickers, have a ‘Knicker Style Guide’? The answer seems to be that when ‘bipartites’ are used in a compound, we drop the s. For this reason, it is a ‘trouser press’ in which we press our trousers (if we do), and we are told to fear a visible ‘panty line’ though it is caused by our panties (supposing we wear them).
Most of us treat all of this as being of vanishingly little consequence, and the language certainly stands it, as it stands much that is peculiar and illogical. Even our foremost gripers—though, like Hooker’s wasps, they are ‘up in sundry places’—seem bothered by only a few of the oddities among English words of number and measure. Still, to promote your cause, if you are keen, you could use some of the unaccommodated examples above. And if your reputation has the least remain at this point, it should soon have shrunk to absolutely nothing at all.