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Comment by ascorbic | Hacker News Reader

In Latin, sure, but not in English. It's meant "kill or destroy a large proportion" for centuries. Wait til you hear about "December"

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December is actually the tenth month. Jan & Feb were added later. It’s the tenth month that was added, though not the tenth month since the start of the year. The array of calendar months was shifted to make room for two additional months at the beginning of the year.

If I have a son, in December, then I have another son the next year in January, which one is my first son?

> Jan & Feb were added later.

At which point it was no longer the tenth month.

My tenth son will always be my tenth son. Though his birthday falls 10 months after that of my twelfth son (whose birthday came in the second month of the calendar year in which he was born), my tenth son will always have come out of the womb tenth!

> My tenth son will always be my tenth son.

Unless you find you had two other sons you didn't know about.

In that case, he would have never been my tenth son, I would have only thought he was. No matter how hard we try, birth order is one of those things that can’t be changed, even with a revelation. Our mental model of it can be corrected, but the order itself is immutable.

Soon we will be told that a century cannot refer to a 100 year period but only a unit of Roman soldiers. The list of words that no longer mean what they once did is very long and it's lame (and wrong) to "correct" people like this.

A century can only refer to 100 miles ridden by bicycle

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