Latin in the Globe
Wow … what bills itself as “Canada’s National Newspaper” (we Westerners were always skeptical of such) incipits a piece thusly:
Word play occurs in unexpected places. Diane Lane, while promoting her recent movie Nights in Rodanthe, branched into a brief discussion of “cide.” “To decide is a great word,” she said, “because it’s like fratricide, matricide, suicide. It means to kill one idea so another idea can live. You de-cide.”
That might seem an odd parallel, but Lane is right about the common origin. The Latin verb was decidere, combining the prefix de (off or down) and caedere (to cut or strike). In making a decision, a person figuratively slices through the alternatives, lopping off the unwanted ones. A split decision – in which some people decide that one person won, and others insist that another won – is particularly nasty, since there’s a splitting of a cutting.
It continues …
