Eliminate, Exterminate & Eradicate

Eliminate (pronounced ih-lim-uh-neyt)

(1) To remove or get rid of, especially as being in some way undesirable.

(2) To omit, especially as being unimportant or irrelevant; leave out.

(3) To remove from further consideration or competition, especially by defeating in sport or other competitive contest.

(4) To eradicate or kill.

(5) In physiology, to void or expel from an organism.

(6) In mathematics, to remove (a quantity) from an equation by elimination.

(7) In sport, as elimination & eliminator (drag racing): category classifications. 

1560–70: From the Latin ēlīminātus (thrust out of the doors; expel), past participle of ēlīmināre, the construct being ē- (out) + līmin- (stem of līmen (threshold)) + -ātus (the Latin first/second-declension suffix (feminine -āta, neuter -ātum)).  The most commonly used form in Latin appears to have been ex limine (off the threshold).  Used literally at first, the sense of "exclude" was first attested in 1714; the now obsolete sense of "expel waste from the body" emerged circa 1795 although the general sense of an "expulsion of waste matter" is from 1855.  Eliminate is a verb, if used with an object, the verbs are eliminated & eliminating, eliminability, eliminant & eliminability are nouns and eliminable, eliminative and eliminatory are adjectives.

Exterminate (pronounced ik-stur-muh-neyt)

Totally to destroy (living things, especially pests or vermin); annihilate; extirpate.

1535–1545: From the Latin exterminātus, past participle of extermināre (to drive away (from terminus boundary)), perfect passive participle of exterminō, the construct being ex- + terminō (I finish, close, end), from terminus (limit, end).  In Late Latin there was also the sense "destroy" from the phrase ex termine (beyond the boundary), ablative of termen (boundary, limit, end).  The meaning "utterly to destroy" appeared in English only by the 1640s, a sense found earlier in equivalent words in French and in the Vulgate; earlier in this sense was the mid-fifteenth century extermine.  Exterminator actually came earlier: as early as circa 1400, the Late Latin exterminator (from past participle stem of exterminare) had the sense of "an angel who expells (people from a country) and, by 1848, as a “substance for ridding a place of rats etc) and by 1938 this was applied to a person whose job it was.  Exterminate is a verb, used with an object the verbs are exterminated & exterminating, exterminable, exterminative & exterminatory are adjectives and extermination & exterminator are nouns.

Eradicate (pronounced ih-rad-i-keyt)

(1) To remove or destroy utterly; extirpate.

(2) To erase by rubbing or by means of a chemical solvent or other agent.

(3) Of plants, to pull up by the roots.

1555–1565: From the Latin ērādīcātus (usually translated as “destroy utterly”; literally “pull up by the roots”), past participle of ērādīcāre (root out, extirpate, annihilate), the construct being ē- (out) + rādīc- (stem of rādīx (root) (genitive radicis)) + -ātus (the Latin first/second-declension suffix (feminine -āta, neuter -ātum)).  The assimilated form of ērādīcāre is derived from the primitive Indo-European wrād (branch, root) and from the same source, the native form of the same idea existed in mid-fifteenth century Middle English as outrōten (to root (something) out; eradicate).  A surprisingly recent creation in 1794 was ineradicable and within a few years, ineradicably.  Eradicate is a verb, eradicant is an adjective and noun, eradicated & eradicating are verbs (used with object), eradicable & eradicative are adjectives, eradicably is an adverb, eradication & eradicator are nouns.

Eliminate, exterminate and eradicate in the age of pandemics

In Modern English usage, eliminate, exterminate and eradicate are often used interchangeably despite differences in nuance.  This means also the wealth of synonyms the three enjoy are sometimes haphazardly used although some overlap does exist, the synonyms including: annihilate, expunge, abolish, erase, uproot, extinguish, efface, demolish, total, abate, liquidate, obliterate, trash, squash, purge, extirpate, scratch, slaughter, decimate, execute, massacre, abolish, erase, extirpate, destroy, oust, waive, ignore, defeat, cancel, exclude, disqualify, invalidate, drop, eject, expel, liquidate, omit, terminate, slay, discard & disregard.

In the (relatively) happy times before the emergence of SARS-Cov2's Delta variant, the New Zealand prime minister declared COVID-19 “eradicated but not eliminated” which did sound given that, regarding disease, the words have specific, technical meanings.  In the context of disease, eradication refers to the complete and permanent worldwide reduction to zero new cases through deliberate effort.  Elimination refers to the reduction to zero (or a very low defined target rate) of new cases in a defined geographical area, which can be any size, a province, country, continent or hemisphere.  As used by virologists and epidemiologists therefore, eradication is used in its normal conversational sense but elimination is applied with a specific technical meaning.  There is a quirk to this. The World Health Organization (WHO) certified the global eradication of smallpox in 1980 although small cultures remain in US and Russian research laboratories.  If these residual stocks are ever destroyed, the WHO may adopt some new term to distinguish between eradication in the wild and an absolute extermination from the planet.  Nobody seems now to believe COVID-19 will ever be eliminated, exterminated or eradicated.  It seems here to stay.

Defendants in the dock, International Military Tribunal (IMT, the main Nuremberg trial (1945-1946)). 

The meanings of eliminate, exterminate & eradicate, both in their English senses and in translation from German have been debated before.  Although not defined in law until the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), the newly (1944) created word genocide appeared in the indictments served at the main Nuremberg trial (1945-1946) upon those accused under count IV, crimes against humanity.  This attracted the interest of lawyers who noted the words exterminate and eliminate appear both in the academic and legal discussions about the novel concept of genocide and in translations of many documents from the Third Reich which related to the Jews.  Defense counsel probed what was meant by these words and whether, in original or translation, their actual meaning in the context of their use was in accord with what was meant when applied to genocide.  The etymological excursion didn’t much help the defendants, most of whom were hanged.  Hermann Göring also raised an objection to a translation from the German being rendered as "final solution to the Jewish problem" rather than "total solution" which, he argued, should compel the court to draw a different inference.  In both discussions, the judges concluded what was being discussed was mass-murder and the relative degree of applicability between synonyms was not a substantive point.  Actually the word used by Göring in the first paragraph of the letter which ultimately authorized the holocaust was Gesamtloesung (complete solution) while in the final paragraph he use Endloesung (final solution).  This was the document which SS-Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant-General) Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942; head of the Reich Security Main Office 1939-1942) revealed at the infamous Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942). 

Professionals in the field of pest control actually stick more closely to classic etymology in their technical distinction between the two central words: extermination and eradication.  Extermination (from the Latin, exterminare meaning “out of the boundary” and related to the deity Terminus who presided over boundaries) means to drive the pests beyond the boundaries of the building.  It doesn’t of necessity mean the pests are all dead, just that they are no longer in the building.  Eradicate (from the Latin eradicare meaning to root out) refers to the processes leading to extermination, to bring to light the breeding spots, the places where the infestation has, so to speak, taken root.

Obliterate

Obliterate (pronounced uh-blit-uh-reyt (U) or oh-blit-uh-reyt (non-U))

(1) To remove or destroy all traces of something; do away with; destroy completely.

(2) In printing or graphic design, to blot out or render undecipherable (writing, marks, etc.); fully to efface.

(3) In medicine, to remove an organ or another body part completely, as by surgery, disease, or radiation.

1590–1600: From the Latin oblitterātus, perfect passive participle of oblitterō (blot out), from oblinō (smear over) and past participle of oblitterāre (to efface; cause to disappear, blot out (a writing) & (figuratively) cause to be forgotten, blot out a remembrance), the construct being ob- (a prefixation of the preposition ob (in the sense of “towards; against”)) + litter(a) (also litera) (letter; script) + -ātus (-ate).  The suffix -ate was a word-forming element used in forming nouns from Latin words ending in -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as estate, primate & senate).  Those that came to English via French often began with -at, but an -e was added in the fifteenth century or later to indicate the long vowel.  It can also mark adjectives formed from Latin perfect passive participle suffixes of first conjugation verbs -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as desolate, moderate & separate).  Again, often they were adopted in Middle English with an –at suffix, the -e appended after circa 1400; a doublet of –ee.  True synonyms include black out, eliminate, exterminate, annihilate, eradicate, delete, erase & expunge because to obliterate something is to remove all traces.  Other words often used as synonyms don’t of necessity exactly convey that sense; they include obscure, ravage, smash, wash out, wipe out, ax, cancel and cut.  Obliterate & obliterated are verds & adjetives, obliteration & obliterator are nouns, obliterature & obliterating are nouns, verb & adjective, obliterable & obliterative are adjectives and obliteratingly is an adverb; the noun plural is obliterations.

Social anxiety can be "obliterated".  Who knew?

The verb obliterate was abstracted from the phrase literas scribere (write across letters, strike out letters).  The noun obliteration (act of obliterating or effacing, a blotting out or wearing out, fact of being obliterated, extinction) dates from the 1650s, from the Late Latin obliterationem (nominative obliteratio), the noun of action from the past-participle stem of oblitterāre (to efface; cause to disappear, blot out (a writing) & (figuratively) cause to be forgotten, blot out a remembrance).  The related late fourteenth century noun oblivion (state or fact of forgetting, forgetfulness, loss of memory) was from the thirteenth century Old French oblivion and directly from the Latin oblivionem (nominative oblivio) (forgetfulness; a being forgotten) from oblivisci, the past participle of oblitus (forget) of uncertain origin.  Oblivion is if interest to etymologists because of speculation about a semantic shift from “to be smooth” to “to forget”, the theory based on the construct being ob- (using ob in the sense of “over”) + the root of lēvis (smooth).  For this there apparently exists no documentary evidence either to prove or disprove the notion.  The Latin lēvis (rubbed smooth, ground down) was from the primitive Indo-European lehiu-, from the root (s)lei- (slime, slimy, sticky).

Obliterature

The noun obliterature is a special derived form used in literary criticism, the construct being oblit(erate) + (lit)erature.  It describes works of literature in some way "obliterated or mad void", the most celebrated (or notorious according to many) being those which "interpreted" things in a manner not intended by the original author but the words is applied also to texts deliberately destroyed, erased or rendered unreadable, either as an artistic statement or as a result of censorship, neglect, or decay.  La biblioteca de Babel" (The Library of Babel (1941)) by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was a short story which imagined a universe consisting of an infinite library containing every possible book but all volumes are some way corrupted or comprise only random strings of characters; all works wholly unintelligible and thus useless.  The chaotic library was symbolic of the most extreme example of obliterature in that all works had been rendered unreadable and devoid of internal meaning.

Nazis burning books, Berlin, 1933.

Probably for a long as writing has existed, there has been censorship (and its companion: self-censorship).  Some censorship is official government policy while countless other instances exist at institutional level, sometimes as a political imperative, some time because of base commercial motives.  The most infamous examples are literary works banned or destroyed as political or religious repression including occasions when the process was one of public spectacle such as the burning of books in Nazi Germany, aimed at Jewish, communist and other “degenerate or undesirable” authors.   The critique: “They burn the books they cannot write” is often attributed German-Jewish poet, writer and literary critic Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) whose work was among the thousands of volumes placed on a bonfire in Berlin in 1933 but it’s a paraphrase of a passage from his play Almansor (1821-1822), spoken by a Muslim after Christian had burned piles of the holy Quran: “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.”  (That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.")

The Address Book (1983) by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle (b 1953) was based on an address book the author found in the street which, (after photocopying the contents) she returned to the owner.  She then contacted those in the book and used the information they provided to create a narrative about the owner, a man she had never met.  This she had published in a newspaper and the man promptly threatened to sue on the grounds of a breach of his right to privacy, demanding all examples of the work in its published form be destroyed.  Duly, the obliterature was performed.  Thomas Phillips' (1937–2022) A Humument: A treated Victorian novel (in various editions 1970-2016) is regarded by most critics as an “altered” book, a class of literature in which novel media forms (often graphical artwork) are interpolated to change the appearance and sometimes elements of meaning.  Phillips use as his base a Victorian-era novel (William (WH) Mallock's (1849–1923) A Human Document (1892)) and painted over its pages, leaving only select words visible to create new narratives, many of which were surreal.  This was obliterature as artistic device and it’s of historic interest because it anticipated many of the techniques of post modernism, multi-media productions and even meme-making.

Erasure Poetry takes an existing text and either erases or blacks-out (the modern redaction technique) words or passages to create a new poem from the remaining words; in the most extreme examples almost all the original is obliterated, with only fragments left to form a new work.  Ronald Johnson (1935–1998) was a US poet who in 1977 published the book-length RADI OS (1977), based on John Milton's (1608–1674) Paradise Lost (1667-1674) and used the redactive mechanism as an artistic device, space once used by the obliterated left deliberately blank, surrounding the surviving words.

Some critics and literary theorists include unfinished and fragmentary work under the rubric of obliterature and while that may seem a bit of a definitional stretch, the point may be that such texts in many ways can resemble what post modern (and post-post modern) obliterature practitioners publish as completed work.  There are many unfinished works by the famous which have been “brought to conclusion” by contracted authors, the critical response tending to vary from the polite to the dismissive although, in fairness, it may be that some things were left unfinished for good reasons.  The Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was extraordinarily prolific and apparently never discarded a single page, leaving a vast archive of unfinished, fragmented, and often unreadable manuscripts, the volume so vast many have never been deciphered.  It’s interesting to speculate that had Pessoa had access to word processors and the cloud whether he would have saved as much; if he’d lived in the age of the floppy diskette, maybe he’d have culled a bit.

The obliteration of animal carcasses with explosives

Strictly speaking, “to obliterate something” means “to remove or destroy all traces” which usually isn’t the case when explosives are used, the result more a wide dispersal of whatever isn’t actually vaporized but there’s something about the word which attracts those who blow-up stuff and they seem often to prefer obliteration to terms which might be more accurate.  As long as the explosion is sufficiently destructive, one can see their point and obliteration does memorably convey the implications of blowing-up stuff.  The word clearly enchanted the US Forest Service which in 1995 issued their classic document Obliterating Animal Carcasses with Explosives, helpfully including a step-by-step guide to the process.  Given it’s probably not a matter about which many have given much thought, the service explained obliterating large animal carcasses was an important safety measure in wilderness recreation areas where the remains might attract bears, or near picnic areas where people obviously wouldn’t want rotting flesh nearby.  A practical aspect also is that in many cases there is no way conveniently to move or otherwise dispose of a large carcass (such as a horse or moose which can weigh in excess of 500 kg (1100 lb) which might be found below a steep cut slope or somewhere remote.  So, where physical transportation is not practical, the chemistry and physics of explosives are the obvious alternative, the guide recommending fireline devices (specially developed coils containing explosive powder), used also to clear combustible materials in the path of a wildfire. 

Interestingly, the guide notes there will be cases in which the goal might not be obliteration.  In some ecosystems, what is most desirable is to disperse the carcass locally into the small chunks suited to the eating habits of predators in the area and when properly dispersed, smaller scavenging animals will break down the left-overs, usually within a week.  To effect a satisfactory dispersal, the guide recommends placing 20 lb (9 kg) of explosives on the carcass in key locations, then using a detonator cord to tie the charges together, the idea being to locate them on the major bones, along the spine.  However, in areas where there’s much human traffic, obliteration is required and the guide recommends placing 20 lb (9 kg) pounds of explosives on top and a similar load underneath although it’s noted this may be impossible if the carcass is too heavy, frozen into the ground, floating in water or simply smells too ghastly for anyone to linger long enough to do the job.  In that case, 55 lb (25 kg) of fireline should be draped over the remains although the actual amount used will depend on the size of the carcass, the general principle being the more explosives used, the greater the chance obliteration will be achieved.  Dispersal and obliteration are obviously violent business but it’s really just an acceleration of nature’s decomposition process.  Whereas a big beast like a horse can sit for months without entirely degrading, if explosives are used, in most cases after little more than a week it’d not be obvious an animal was ever there.  With regard to horses however, the guide does include the warning that prior to detonation, “horseshoes should be removed to minimize dangerous flying debris.”  Who knew?

It’s important enough explosives are used to achieve the desired result but in carcass disposal it's important also not to use too much.  In November 1970, the Oregon Highway Division was tasked with blowing up a 45-foot (14 m) eight-ton (8100 kg) decaying whale which lay on the shores near the town of Florence and they calculated it would need a half-ton (510 kg) of dynamite, the presumption being any small pieces would be left for seagulls and other scavengers.  Unfortunately, things didn’t go according to plan.  The viewing crowds had been kept a quarter-mile (400 m) from the blast-site but they were forced to run for cover as large chunks of whale blubber started falling on them and the roof of a car parked even further away was crushed.  Fortunately there were no injuries although most in the area were splattered with small pieces of dead whale.  Fifty years on, Florence residents voted to name a new recreation ground Exploding Whale Memorial Park in honor of the event.