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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Jan 25, 2011 - 01:10am PT
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You betcha.
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Lacey
Social climber
Burns,Oregon
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Jan 25, 2011 - 01:15am PT
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rhetoric
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tuolumne_tradster
Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
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Jan 25, 2011 - 01:18am PT
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low hanging fruit
actually
like
irregardless (not a word)
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Fritz
Trad climber
Choss Creek, ID
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Jan 25, 2011 - 01:20am PT
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Ok! I forced myself to read every post in this thread.
To my surprise: decimate is not denounced.
TV newscasters find it a wonderful word to describe disasters or mass-killings.
The dictionary definition of decimate used to be from Roman use of the word:
To select by lot and kill one in every ten of.
I find it interesting that the Free Dictionary http://www.thefreedictionary.com/decimate
gives this information about public acceptance of mis-use of decimate:
Usage Note: Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a group. Sixty-six percent of the Usage Panel accepts this extension in the sentence The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war, even though it is common knowledge that the number of Jews killed was much greater than a tenth of the original population. However, when the meaning is further extended to include large-scale destruction other than killing, as in The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, only 26 percent of the Panel accepts the usage.
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Rudder
Trad climber
Long Beach, CA
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Jan 25, 2011 - 01:43am PT
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Did anyone mention "sort of" yet?
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Iron Mtn.
Trad climber
Riverside, Ca.
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Jan 25, 2011 - 03:07am PT
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REALLY?
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
SoCal
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Jan 25, 2011 - 10:31am PT
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Fritz- I'm with you on decimate. Just because you get to write for/speak on TV doesn't mean you are literate.
Decimate was used by Gengis Khan to effectively control populations. You ride in. Line everyone up. Count them off 1-10. Draw a number out of a hat. Kill everyone with that number. Do that at 3 or 4 towns and the rest of the population magically cooperates.
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Chinchen
climber
Way out there....
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Jan 25, 2011 - 11:42am PT
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Moist
venga!!!
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Captain...or Skully
climber
leading the away team, but not in a red shirt!
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Jan 25, 2011 - 11:54am PT
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evil.
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MisterE
Social climber
Bouncy Tiggerville
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Jan 25, 2011 - 02:12pm PT
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Legit
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Tfish
Trad climber
La Crescenta, CA
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Jan 25, 2011 - 02:57pm PT
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Hella and Liability
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drljefe
climber
El Presidio San Augustin del Tucson
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Jan 25, 2011 - 03:04pm PT
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splitter
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MisterE
Social climber
Bouncy Tiggerville
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Jan 25, 2011 - 04:52pm PT
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"Grape-smuggler"
"Convo", short for conversation: "I just had a convo with them recently!" I hate that shortening, it sounds SUTPID!
"Tribe" is over-used, as well
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Jan 25, 2011 - 04:53pm PT
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"Nation", as in "SuperTopo Nation" and so on. Another commercial promotion tool.
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dogtown
Trad climber
JackAssVille, Wyoming
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Jan 25, 2011 - 04:54pm PT
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sweeeeeet dude!!!!!!!!
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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Jan 25, 2011 - 05:04pm PT
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decimate does not equal annihialate, purge, slaughter, genocide.
Yes, I've also heard it used incorrectly recently.
Applied to New Orleans for instance. About 1500 people died. For comparison NO had about 1500 police officers and about 100,000 stayed behind.
About 1/60 who stayed died.
OK, maybe that's modern decimation. Pretty shocking when you think about it.
From Wikipedia Gengis Khan: "Many of these invasions resulted in the large-scale slaughter of local populations, which have given Genghis Khan and his empire a fearsome reputation in local histories.[5] It has been estimated that his campaigns killed as many as 40 million people based on census data of the times."
The net effect may have been decimation (1 in 10) but locally it was more like extermination.
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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Jan 25, 2011 - 05:33pm PT
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can't believe none of these has appeared in 257 posts:
War on Crime
War on Drugs
War on Terror
wars on crime and drugs make linquistic sense. They're against specific people and activities. Well defined by law. Whether the wars themselves make any practical sense is arguable.
War on Terror
Being pedantic: "terror" is an emotion, terrified is the state of being.
"terrorism" is a thing, sort of, loosely defined. But is terrorism an activity or a political ideal like communism or capitalism or libertarianism?
We might call it the "war on terrorism" if we really wanted to understand it, but then we'd have to explain what we're doing and why we're doing it.
Someone's terrorist is someone else's freedom fighter.
By Bush's definition, the Boston Tea Partiers might have been classified terrorists.
To the remains of a family half destroyed by a drone fired missile we are terrorists.
We are adrift when we can't articulate what we're fighting for, or who we're fighting against. The definition of asymmetrical warfare.
more pedantry:
don't get me started on "climate change" when you really mean "global warming". They are intimately related but in no way are they interchangeable. One is the cause, the other the effect.
There's da*% all we can do about climate change directly except build dikes and significantly change our way of life until the earth fries like Venus. There's a huge amount we can do about global warming.
Sometimes getting the language correct really does matter.
(off my soapbox)
((now I know why I didn't get into this thread before post 250))
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