Citations:duodecimation

erroneous use where is meant

 * 1917, Oral Hygiene (Robert C. Ketterer), volume 7, page 27
 * Take a thousand of the infants born in this country today. This is the 24th day of March, if I remember, 1916. Where will they be on the 24th day of March, 1917? Well, I will tell you where 127 of them will be — in their little graves. Why, do you realize the enormity of that figure? We speak about a regiment being decimated in battle. What does that mean? It means one man in ten has been killed or wounded. This is duodecimation. Duodecimation, twelve and seven-tenths in a hundred — worse than decimation. And we look with horror upon the battle when ten per cent of the men are killed, and yet we look with complaisance upon the condition where twelve and seven-tenths of our innocent children are killed.

Other

 * 1949, Edgar Wadsworth Smith [ed.], The Baker Street Journal: An Irregular Quarterly of Sherlockiana (Baker Street Irregulars), volume 4, issue 1, page 42
 * Sherlock Holmes, with his cat-neat mind, always referred to that story [', Chaucer] as a monograph on The Duodecimation' of Gases''.
 * In that story a friar asks "What is a ferthyng worth parted in twelve?". gas is a reference to "intestinal gas", "marsh gas", and empty words.