"Decimate". Bah, I say!

[glee]

I spit upon people who use ‘decimate’ when e.g. 9% or 11% deaths are involved.
These people have no idea how important it is to keep the precise original meanings. :eek:

[OneCentStamp]

@DiosaBellissima

And further: do you notice when people switch the words *decimate * and annihilate ? Are you bothered when you notice? Do you ever correct people or do you feel that’s a bit much?

Oh, you don’t know the half of it. And by “half,” I mean somewhere between 10% and 90%. Literally.

[Misnomer]

What Miller said. Picking and choosing which words’ origins vs common usage you’re going to get all worked up about goes beyond pedantry, IMO. It’s a living, evolving language. If you don’t like it, go work for the French government or something.

[Interrobang]

You’re invoking the etymological fallacy: “a linguistical misconception based on the idea that the etymology of a word or phrase is its actual meaning.”

Arnold Zwicky specifically cites “decimate” as an example of said fallacy in a 2004 post at Langage Log.

@Arnold Zwicky

People maintain that “decimate” can’t mean ‘almost entirely wipe out’ because it really means ‘wipe out one-tenth of’. Or that “since” and “while” can only be used as temporal connectives, not as logical ones (meaning, roughly, ‘because’ and ‘although’), because that was their original meaning. (“Original” is, of course, a moving target here.) What’s going on here is a reluctance to recognize change, and that idea can be applied to all sorts of innovations: a [t] in “often” or an [l] in “walk” (note that these things can come around in cycles); the use of past forms in counterfactual conditionals (“if I was your father”); plural subject-verb agreement with “none” (“None of the students were prepared”), because “none” is really “not one” and therefore singular; and so on.

Words being used now mean what they mean, not what they used to mean.

[CalMeacham]

I’ve always thought that “decimate”, in deference to its origin, ought to mean “having a portion wiped out, but not completely destroyed”. But i probably haven’t been completely consistent in my own use, let alone correcting others. I can live with people misusing it to mean “annhilate”.
My favorite comment on the word is an aside delivered by someone in Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe (which I highly recommend, although with a bit of salt):

“How many languages even HAVE a word for ‘Killing One in every Ten’?”

[garygnu]

@Interrobang!?

…Words being used now mean what they mean, not what they used to mean.

Thank you! Nice links, too.

Everybody else get over it.

[Terrifel]

You’re overlooking the simplest solution to the problem: kill every tenth person who uses the word wrong.

[Litoris]

Ya know what’s funny is that it would be easy enough to guess that decimate means 10% is destroyed (well, ya know, if you understand the language at all) but I never knew that. I always saw “decimate” as somehow less than annihilate, though and never have used them interchangeably. Neither are common words in any of the conversations I have, so they both have remained blissfully beneath my radar. Yeh, you’re being anal retentive, but big deal, it’s your life.

[Cat_Whisperer]

Shall we get into the "enormity"discussion as well?