Decimal coinage – on pedantry, punishment and poems of regret

An Irishman’s Diary: What does decimate really mean now?

England’s Maro Itoje. Photograph: David Davies/PA Wire.

There are still pedants out there – I might even be one myself – who regret that the original meaning of “decimate” is no longer much called for in everyday life. Some hardline purists would probably justify reintroduction of the Roman policy for mutinous troops, randomly punishing (by death sometimes) one in every 10, if only to give the term a new lease.

The worst I wish on the English team is that it might be decimated.

Failing that, like a vacant house occupied by squatters, the once-precise verb is now used for lesser, vaguer meanings, on the theme of general destruction. The style guides, meanwhile, have all but given up on demanding any reference to 10 per cent. The most The Economist, for example, now insists is that the verb should mean to destroy “a proportion of” something, rather than “all or nearly all”.

I bring this up again because as recently as Thursday night, on Twitter, I saw one of my colleagues criticised for supposed misuse of the verb. And I too was inclined to tell the critic to let it go. But then I checked the night's European football results and saw – as if by act of a pedant God – that Glasgow Rangers had just been decimated in their game against Slavia Prague.

Already down to 10 men after an earlier red card, they were reduced to nine when Leon Balogun was sent off. Maybe there was life in the concept yet, I thought, even if double sendings-off are rare. Strictly speaking, based on the Latin for 11, Rangers had been "undecimated" by the first red. But being a moderate, I might tolerate "decimated" covering both cases, with a margin for error.

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A child’s place

There used to be a tradition, now confined largely to Jacob Rees-Mogg, of naming children according to their number in Latin (Quintus, Sextus, etc). This explains Decimus Burton, the famous English architect who redesigned the Phoenix Park during the 19th century.

He was also a 10th child. And I mention him only because, as at least one eagle-eyed reader noticed, I spoke yesterday of a part of his redesigned park in which people were rarely “stationery”. That should of course have read “stationary”. The other spelling means writing paper. I apologise for the implied absurdity and promise to turn a new leaf.

Big House

Writer Elizabeth Bowen is synonymous with the "Big House", specifically Bowen's Court, the mansion she inherited in north Cork. But I see that a new book about her centres on a relationship with a different House: Humphry House, a cad of the English variety with whom she once had a painful affair.

I'm ashamed to say I have never read any of Bowen's books, something I plan to rectify soon. More happily, she and Bowen's Court are recurring features in one of my favourite anthologies, Molly Keane's Ireland (1993), which I visit often. Here is Virginia Woolf describing the house (and household): "Elizabeth's home was merely a great stone box, but full of Italian mantelpieces and decayed 18th-century furniture, and carpets all in holes – however they insisted on keeping up a ramshackle kind of state, dressing for dinner and so on."

Here are the haunting last words of the anthology: an honour given to Bowen as she discusses the estrangement between her social class and the Irish people at large: “Meanwhile the Gaelic culture ran aground, with its ceaseless poetry of lament. (Gaelic was spoken in the kitchens and fields and in an untouched country the settlers did not know.) It has taken the decline of the Anglo-Irish to open them to the poetry of regret: only dispossessed people know their land in the dark.”

That in turn set me reading another anthology: Thomas Kinsella’s New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, which is full of the poetry of regret, much of it translated from the Gaelic. It includes, for example, an elegiac epigram from an anonymous 18th century bard, on the theme that all things must pass, eventually, even if he doesn’t sound too confident: “The world laid low, and the wind blew like a dust/ Alexander, Caesar, and all their followers./Tara is grass; and look how it stands with Troy./And even the English – maybe they might die.”

I’m sure that “die” was more poetic in Irish. And it’s in similarly poetic spirit that I hope the recent English superiority in rugby will pass – peacefully and surrounded by friends – this weekend.

The worst I wish on the English team is that it might be decimated. If the pedant gods are listening, this could be achieved by having Maro Itoje sent off from the original 15.

At his best, he’s worth a man and a half.