What you may need to know:
1. Sci-fi set in 2044. Solar storms have turned the world’s surface into a radioactive desert and decimated the population to 21 million. Robots carry out the manual labour necessary for humankind’s survival.
2. Insurance guy Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas) investigates a robot that’s broken one of the security protocols (ie. Asimov’s laws) designed to protect their human overlords.
3. A cross between Blade Runner (1982) and I, Robot (2004) that’s not based on a story by Philip K. Dick? Strange.
4. Kudos to sophomore director Gabe Ibáñez for taking a modest $15m budget and making it look like a lot more.
5. 2044 and no flying cars or hoverboards? Come on science, step up.
6. Broadsheet Prognosis: Linguo… dead?
Release Date: October 10 (US).
(DelBoy is away. Mark blogs about film, TV and other stuff at WhyBother.ie)
I’ll see it. I love dystopian/post-apocalyptic shtuff like that.
Would you be interested in buying a house in Roscommon?
kudos
Heheh :)
Brilliant.
Oh Mani…
Binary solo
Okay, someone has to be *that guy* – Decimation literally means ‘removal of at tenth’ – would be much cooler (and accurate) to say ‘and near-annihiliated the Earth’s population’
Language evolves dude. There’s a strong argument for “it a word means X to the vast majority of people, then X is what the word means”. I have never heard “decimation” used in the literal way you mean, but only in the way intended by OP.
Another example: “incredible” literally means “something that cannot be believed”, but we all now use it to mean something astonishing.
You cannot fix a language in time, try as you might.
I agree, language evolves, and even the Oxford Dictionary says it means to remove a ‘large proportion of’. But decimate has such a cool and logical meaning in it’s orginal form that I feel the need to defend it: as a word it’s mostly useless but occasionally brilliantly specific.
Puts on spectacles, gets into motorcar and perambulates back to the museum of defunct words where I figuratively can’t even.
Sure, that’s a point. There are plenty words to describe what OP means (when he uses decimate) but none now to describe the meaning you talk about. So that’s a pity.
But the fact that a language pedant like me has never heard of this in his 30 years suggests that the battle for retention of the original meaning of decimate may have already been lost…
Also, no-one has to be that guy. That guy is rude and annoying.
I literally agree with you.
Linguo [i]is[/i] dead
Argh, should have been:
Linguo is dead