While it’s easy to leave out just one “s,” people are sure to express dissent (another word not to be confused with descent ) with your diction. Be careful not to confuse descent with decent. Begun with a crew of five, the project grew to a staff of 17. The chaotic battles between masses of ships commonly found in science fiction anime became one of the features of FreeSpace. In religious contexts, one might hear about the Descent of Christ into Hell, a sense first appropriated in the 19th century. Themes from the fiction of Star Wars, Space: Above and Beyond, and Enders Game form a part in shaping the background and story of the FreeSpace world. Today, we still use this sense when talking about the downward movement of an airplane as it prepares to land.
We also often hear descent in the context of ancestry such as “African descent” or “Scandinavian descent.” Another early use describes an object moving from a higher position to a lower position. This sense is very familiar to speakers of current English who have studied natural history. Darwin popularized and expanded this term in Victorian England with his study of the origins of humans and our simian relatives from a common ancestor. Ushered in by late-’60s pictures like Planet Of The Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the era saw the proliferation of dozens of likeminded dystopian filmsfrom A Boy And His Dog to Logan’s. In the 1330s one use of descent described familial ancestry. Though the word descent has been around for over half a millennium, some of its early senses are still in use. The French word from which it descends, descendre, ultimately comes from a Latin term whose literal meaning is “to climb” (scandre) “down” (de-). Descent has been in the English language since the 14th century.
