The buttercups and snowflakes were literally shaking.
I’ve thought that they’ve conflated the word with “devastate”.
decimated is reducing TO 1/10. wiping out 9/10.
So everyone’s gotten the memo?
The word comes from the Roman method of punishing military units. They would execute every tenth soldier.
Never made sense to me but it supposedly worked.
As I understand the word’s history, it was a motivational technique used by the Romans on their own legions, following poor performance in battle.
I do not want Barack Hussein’s legacy decimated - that would allow the communists to keep 90% of the damage inflicted. I want Hussein’s legacy annihilated. I want nothing left of these eight terrible years beyond a crippling debt that our children will be unable to forget and a terrible lesson that I pray they will never forget.
The next time some idiot tells me he was decimated ( probably intending to say “devastated”) I’ll ask him which 10% he’s missing....
:)
Decimate was a practice done by the Roman Army when they didn’t do well in battle and they needed to be disciplined to do better the next time. Every tenth man was put to death, hence the troops were decimated.
The snowflakes were DECIMATED by the Trump win, poor dears.
http://militaryhistorynow.com/2014/02/26/no-safety-in-numbers-a-brief-history-of-decimation/
Decimate
While the term today is generally equated with a massive defeat, the Latin word decimation actually means “the removal of a tenth”.
In the age of the Roman legions, army units that mutinied, fled in the face of the enemy or under-performed in combat could be singled out for group punishment in the form of decimation.
Under such a sentence, a body of troops would be divided into sections of 10 men. One soldier from each group would be chosen at random, usually through a lottery. The unlucky infantryman would then to be beaten to death by his comrades. The sentences were carried out immediately regardless of the victim’s rank, reputation or even involvement in the transgression in question. The fatal blows were typically with clubs — a practice the Romans called fustuarium.
A lethal beating in the Roman Legion was called a ‘fustuarium’.
I keep seeing “bigly” - which sounds really stupid.