The Origin of Words and Phrases

[Trollheart]

I've always been interested in the origins of words, and so I thought it might be interesting to (what do you mean, think again Trollheart? Charming!) look at some popular and well-used words and phrases and see where they came from. Probably everyone knows this one but anyway,,.

Decimate
Current usage: to destroy or utterly wreck something, to leave nothing of it behind. (After the drone strike the city was decimated; the army decimated the other army - and, in less literal usage, Liverpool's attack decimated the poorly-thought-out defence of Sunderland (football, in case you don't get it).

Origin:  In Ancient Rome, the practice had existed but it was Marcus Linius Crassus (pronounced creases) who revived it in 73 BC, during the Third Servile War, or the Spartacus Slave Revolt to you. In fact, the procedure goes way back before him, its earliest use recorded almost exactly 400 years prior, in 471 BC. The idea was to both punish desertion or dereliction of duty, and also to rigidly enforce discipline, basically make it preferable to take your chances fighting the enemy than fall foul of the rules of decimation. Here's how it went, explained to us by the Roman historian Polybius:

"If ever these same things [cowardice] happen to occur among a large group of men... the officers reject the idea of bludgeoning or slaughtering all the men involved [as is the case with a small group or an individual]. Instead they find a solution for the situation which chooses by a lottery system sometimes five, sometimes eight, sometimes twenty of these men, always calculating the number in this group with reference to the whole unit of offenders so that this group forms one-tenth of all those guilty of cowardice. And these men who are chosen by lot are bludgeoned mercilessly in the manner described above."

So, while undoubtedly an unfair and brutal punishment, decimation seems to have been the ultimate leveller, the one from which you could not hide. You might have been the bravest in a battle, but if you chose the short straw, your number was up. And it would not be an easy death, as our mate Polybius outlines above. No quick sword through the heart or beheading; this was a savage, brutal beating, and while it was horrible in itself, surely it was more so because it was your comrades who were carrying it out?

Back to Crassus. Said to have been the richest man in Rome at the time, he was given charge of the legions to take out Spartacus, who had humbled and humiliated the Empire (well, at this point it was still the Roman Republic) and had no intentions of being another, so to speak, scalp on the ex-slave's belt. So to make sure his men did not even think of turning tail, Crassus (also said to be a very brutal and disliked leader, I wonder why?) re-instigated the punishment of decimation. Up to then, it had faded from practice, the last time its use having been recorded around the third century BC.

So, because the word decimatio means "to remove a tenth" in Latin, to decimate is, or was, to divide the men of any group (usually a chortle, sorry cohort in Rome, about 500 men) into groups of ten, have them all draw straws and then have the others batter the unlucky guy to death.

You might be interested/surprised/wish I'd die to hear that this ancient practice continued - sporadically, of course - well into the twentieth century, with its last example being in the First World War. Guess it was a case of when in Rome, eh? Or rather, not. Certainly though, one lottery you did not want to win!

[Janszoon]

I want to know what they called belly buttons before buttons were invented.

[Trollheart]

I'll get right on it.

[Trollheart]

First, thanks a lot for that! I had to endure many pictures I would rather not have seen - there's nothing remotely attractive about that part of the body. Ugh. Anyway, to answer your question - if it was one, rather than just a joke - it wasn't. Called a belly button, that is, before buttons were invented. The phrase only came into vogue, in America (where it was coined) around 1875, at which time, obviously, buttons were a well-established clothing closure,

Not that you asked, but because I like to drone on at length (no, I do, honestly!) a quick history of button without the belly reveals that buttons have been in use by us since about 2,600 BC. So there. To all intents and purposes, buttons were always here, and probably always will be.

[Janszoon]

1875? So what did Abraham Lincoln call his belly button then?!

[Lisnaholic]

I'm too lazy to research much, I'm afraid, but was hoping that I could add my five cents anyway.

We all know that English is built up from words that come from all over the place, and that fact is neatly illustrated by this theory:
1 000 years ago, a typical Anglo-Saxon villager would have the vocab he needed for what he talked about: lots of short words of Germanic/Scandanavian origin: cat, house, cow, tree, dog. It was only after the Norman invasion (1066) that those fancy French knights brought with them sophisticated things like books in Latin. As Britain became more literate, those simple village words stayed, but their (Latin) adjective forms look and sound completely different:-

cat-feline, house-domestic, cow-bovine, tree-arboreal, dog-canine. Belly-button ...stomachal-fastenine . See? It works every time!

[Trollheart]

1875? So what did Abraham Lincoln call his belly button then?!

Four score and ten, probably.
Or navel. Not a Confederate one though.
Maybe a Lincoln belly hole?