The Curious Case of Matus: A Linguistic Thought Experiment
Have you ever stopped mid-sentence and thought, Wait… if decimate means to reduce by one-tenth, wouldn’t centimate mean to reduce by one-hundredth? No? Just me? Well, buckle up, because we’re about to go on a journey of language, logic, and maybe a little made-up Latin fun.
The Math of Mayhem
Let’s start with the term decimate. It comes from the Latin decimare, which literally means “to take a tenth.” In ancient Rome, if a unit of soldiers had done something very naughty—like mutiny or cowardice—a commander might punish them by killing every tenth man. Brutal, yes. But precise. That’s decimation.
Fast forward to modern usage: when someone says a city was “decimated,” they almost always mean “completely destroyed.” Not 10%. Not even 90%. More like… rubble. This shift from exacting punishment to total annihilation is a case study in how words can drift far from their roots over time.
So that raises a cheeky question: If we can decimate something, can we centimate it? Can we punish something just a little bit—maybe delete one out of every hundred unread emails instead of doing inbox zero? “I didn’t clean the whole room, I just centimated the clutter.” It has a kind of precision that appeals to a certain type of person (Doucheroo, our precocious 15-year-old anarchist from rural Michigan, would be all about this). In fact, if capitalism is the problem, maybe we don’t need to smash the system—just centimate it a bit. Redistribute 1% of the wealth. No? Okay, maybe decimate it is.
But What Happens When Something Has Been… Mated?
Now we get to the weird part. If decimate means to reduce by one-tenth, and hypothetically centimate means to reduce by one-hundredth, then what about just plain mate?
Has something been “mated”? Was it tenderly paired with a lover, or completely obliterated in a linguistic explosion of soft, moist chaos?
This is where things get juicy. The word mate as we use it in English comes from several different roots. As a noun or verb related to companionship, it’s likely from the Middle Low German gemate, meaning “one eating at the same table.” But if we’re playing with the Latin root matus—which means “soft” or “moist”—then a strange picture begins to form.
Could mated in this context mean something so softened, so utterly reduced, that it’s been rendered into a puddle of its former self? A sort of moist obliteration? A gentle ending? Like decimating with vibes instead of violence?
If that’s the case, then maybe to be mated is the final form of decimation. Not just the loss of a tenth. Not even the loss of a hundredth. But an emotional, softening conclusion to all resistance. A force so tender that it erases with compassion.
A Call for New Words (and Weird Uses of Old Ones)
So here’s a proposal, straight from Doucheroo’s thought journal and scratched into the underside of a highway overpass:
Centimate (verb): to reduce gently or slightly; a tiny, almost imperceptible reform.
Mate (verb): to render powerless through softness; to overwhelm with moisture; to end a force not with fire, but with fuzz.
Language is weird. It evolves, it mutates, it gets memed into oblivion. But sometimes, in the middle of overthinking etymology, we find new ways to describe the world—ones that are more poetic, more precise, or just more fun.
So the next time you shave 1% off your to-do list or collapse into a warm, sobbing heap after reading an emotionally devastating webcomic, just remember: you haven’t failed. You’ve been centimated. Or maybe… mated.
And isn’t that kind of beautiful?
Want more weird etymology and leftist whimsy? Doucheroo’s zine, Dialectics & Dirty Jokes, drops every solstice. Stay moist, comrades.