Posted on 07/18/2006 7:45:03 AM PDT by Pokey78
"four million dead but, as they haven't found a way to pin it on Bush, nobody cares"
Priceless quote.
I saw an interesting reconstruction of the Battle of Agincourt. You may recall that the English Logbow was credited with virtually wiping out the massed armored knights of the French Army. The battle reconstruction focused on the narrow frontage & treated the French heavy cavalry charge from a "crowd control" perspective. Essentially the heavily armed & armored French were hemmed in so tightly that there wasn't enough room to fight -- or to escape. They literally trampled themselves & those survivors were slaughtered by the English -- many after they surrendered.
I would also suggest "War" by Gwynne Dyer. Dyer is a bit of a lib, but his approach to the subject -- especially ancient warfare -- is pretty enlightening.
Yeah, I had the same take on that book. It's almost as if the writer were straining to tag Americans with a crime that would balance off the tendency of the Japanese to behead & eat their prisoners.
Careful there. There were pirates & fishermen from Europe visiting the eastern seaboard many years before the first settlement. It's possible that the first real contacts with the natives were just not all that well documented.
It looks like the Norse settlements in Canada & Greenland were wiped out by Inuit expansion as well as environmental factors (the Little Ice Age).
:')
Oh yeah, the offensive mascots BS.
Sounds like a plan...
Use of "decimation" by a purportedly educated person to mean "devastation" sounds and is IGNORANT. It is a public school phenomenon and its user should not be proud to claim he accepted public school limits without looking beyond what he was presented there. It is not a matter of "purism" in this case but of random use of adjectives because one doesn't know what a word actually means and decimation sounds kind of like destruction and some of those other big words and, gee, youse knows what I mean anyways.
New World Dictionary of American English:
decimate -- 1) (orig) to select by lot and kill every tenth one;
2) to destroy or kill a large part;
3) (obs) to take a tenth part of
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:
decimate -- 1. To destroy or kill a large part of (a group);
2. a. To inflict great destruction or damage on;
b. To reduce markedly in amount;
3. To select by lot and kill one in every ten of;
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.
Mirriam-Webster:
decimate -- 1 : to select by lot and kill every tenth man of;
2 : to exact a tax of 10 percent from;
3 a : to reduce drastically especially in number;
b : to cause great destruction or harm to;
Shall I go on? There are dozens of others, up to and including the Oxford, which, by the way, doesn't even include the archaic definition except as a footnote "more or less totally superseded" by the modern usage.
So are YOU the authority or are you simply some smarmy, smug, self-righteous word nazi who thinks he knows something nobody else does? I know full well the etymology of the word. But I also know its CURRENT usage, you know, the one that ISN'T 2,000 years out of date.
As did I! I got really annoyed with his trying to justify the horrendous crimes of the Japanese in World War II.
Oh, and about that Tim Rice quote... while I respect the man for doing so, I wish he hadn't declined and stuck with us with Schwartz, who is notorious for his awful lyrics and gave us such subtle messages as "They're different from us, which means they must be evil!"
I am not surprised to read that a YEC thinks "ability to torture the logic of others" is what debate is about.
The current Merriam Webster's is simply not useful nor is the New World Dictionary. If 3 people can be shown to have used a word a certain way on the street and another has written it in something that got published once then MW and NWD will baptize that word and/or usage. It still sounds ignorant, aggressively ignorant. It is like using "they" for third person singular.People who use such words with their new street validated meanings usually have problems discussing things that require that they and their interlocutors actually know what they are talking about. It becomes feelings and emotions because that doesn't require any precision.
The current Merriam Webster's is simply not useful nor is the New World Dictionary. If 3 people can be shown to have used a word a certain way on the street and another has written it in something that got published once then MW and NWD will baptize that word and/or usage. It still sounds ignorant, aggressively ignorant. It is like using "they" for third person singular.People who use such words with their new street validated meanings usually have problems discussing things that require that they and their interlocutors actually know what they are talking about. It becomes feelings and emotions because that doesn't require any precision.
Thanks, it sounds like a fun book!
Similarities to what happened at Cannae. The Roman soldiers were so tightly packed together that many of them were crushed and died while still standing.
"You can lay a thousand bricks; but that won't make you a Mason.
But eat just ONE penis, and......"
LOL!
Oh bull!
Seems I recall there being MILLIONS of bison when the Europeans arrived!
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