I totally agree. I consider misuse of this term a sign of poor teaching (i.e., lack of classical education).
It depends on where you are standing.
Means to cut by 10.................
“The complaint about the word typically centers on the fact that decimate is used improperly to refer to ‘destroying a large portion of something’, when the ‘true’ meaning of the word is ‘to put to death (or punish) one of every ten’.”
Unfortunately, the “Dictionary” has already rendered your objection irrelevant, just as our “benevolent” SCOTUS and Department of “Justice” have redefined what is right and good for us.
Decimate (Definition 1):
to destroy a great number or proportion of:
The population was decimated by a plague.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/decimate?s=t
A cartoon character demonstrates how to ‘decimate’; “I HATE those Mee-cess TO PIECES!!!” Pixie & Dixie & Mr. Jinks.
Decimation was a punishment is the Roman legions for poor performance
When President Obama boasted that al-Quaida was “decimated,” my thought was, since its strength has only been reduced by ten percent, what is there to brag about?
How about the phrase ‘very unique’? That phase is one of my pet peeves. ‘Unique’ means ‘one of a kind’. Something or someone either IS, or IS NOT unique. That phrase would be like saying a woman is ‘partly’ or ‘almost’ pregnant!
I’ve even heard the phrases ‘very unique’ and ‘almost unique’ used by an MBA who taught at a university after an international business culsulting career, including the original Canary Wharf development. Very disappointing to hear such mistakes from a ‘professional’.
Another pet peeve of mine is the misuse of “apocalypse” to mean calamity or catastrophe, when the word actually means disclosure.
No. It means to kill one out of every ten.
Overwhelming usage has changed the meaning of the word decimate, therefor I cannot see how you can claim the word is “misused.”
Why don’t we look at the REALLY irritating change of ordinary words such as “Gay.” I weep for the deliberate destruction of a litany of lovely words which have been “misused” to the extreme. “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay” is a far cry from the new meaning of the word; unnatural.
I have to disagree. Language is constantly in flux, and the only legitimate measure of a word’s “proper” meaning is whether that meaning is universally understood or not.
Once it has achieved a level where the vast majority of English speakers will understand the usage easily, then it is proper usage. Language is defined by the people who speak it, not by the academics who document how it is spoken in dictionaries and grammar texts.
My pet peeve is the word ‘only’ placed in the wrong place in a sentence...................
Irregardless.....
Decimate is based upon a dead white man’s language, Latin. Therefore why should people today know what it means? And remember, words today mean whatever we want them to mean. And my definition can be the exact opposite of yours and “that’s ok because it’s my definition and my reality.”
Hilarious. This is my husband’s ONE irritation. Liking military and Roman history, he always cringes.
I explain that language goes through creep, change, which official term in linguistics I forget.
Meanwhile, he doesn’t mind all the PAese bad grammar including “grass needs cut” and “boy needs spanked”.
See too, "gay."
If you're speaking English 2,000 years later it means to severely damage or destroy something. Just as if you were speaking to Socrates you would refer to the play "Oedipus Rex" as a "goat song" (tragodia) but today you'd just call it a tragedy without evoking any image of suffering goats.
Language is far from immutable.