So if Trump Triple Decimates the number of liberal judges he only eliminates 26.9% ?
Good points made. Even if “to decimate” means to kill onr out of 1o, if the total number is 100,000, then to decimate means to kill 10,000, not an insignificant number.
When President Obama boasted that ISIS had been “decimated,” I wondered, why is reducing it by ten percent something to crow about?
Yes we do.
Thank you.
It drives the anal retentive side of my mind crazy wen people misuse that word.
Don’t even get me started on “factoid”.
The word font was not originally synonymous with the word typeface. The font was a set of metal letters used to print words. Two different sizes of the same typeface were different fonts.
The word logo was short for logotype. A symbol such as the Texaco star was a trademark, not a logo. But the two words are now used interchangeably.
Unlike Latin, English is a living language and meanings change over time. People need to get over this decimate thing!
I can see this post is going to be filled with replies from FReepers who didn’t read past the headline.
A word is just a symbol for a concept. The same word can be used to symbolize several different concepts that are still somewhat similar in meaning.
Decimation is also a term that is used in digital signal processing where it means to reduce the sample rate by some amount, which can be any number not just 10, i.e. “decimate by 5”.
About a week ago there was a wonderful thread here that included much discussion (some of it heated) on the use of “decimate” that I was reckless enough to join in on. So of course I might as well do so again.
One of the things I realized later is if one sticks to strict, exactly-literal definition of the word it would essentially have to die out due to lack of usage. After all, if you’re in charge of a Roman legion you do in fact have the power to decide you’re going to kill every tenth soldier in your troop. But pretty much nobody can do that today - and those who could (like bonehead Jihadists) are unlikely to be satisfied with homicide at the 10% level.
And if you’re going to stick to a strict ‘one-in-ten’ tally, how often is that likely to happen as a matter of course? If some nut shoots up a movie theater, and kills 9 people out of 101, can we say he decimated the audience? If you’re using “decimate” in the strict sense, are you allowed to round off? Can anybody think of any situation in the past century or two in which exactly one-tenth of an assemblage was killed?
I didn’t know the root of the word decimate until I saw a show maybe 20 years ago about a Roman General who punished his men by decimating them or killing one tenth.
Although I flunked Latin in high school, I knew it came from the Roman word for ten or tenth.
Now it has taken on a more general meaning which is OK. Even if you know where the word originated, in colloquial use it means to really damage or reduce.
Great point!
MW had a point that decimate can still effectively be used beyond its literal meaning, but then goes positively stupid. An historic, specific contextual use is not the same as a definition. “Ovation” comes from “exult,” therefore is applicable whenever someone is exulted. “Century” means a collection of 100, and makes sense for 100 years as well as 100 soldiers.
The interesting is that “decimate” had nothing to do with Roman soldiers, but taxation. However, Cromwell did seek to destroy the Royalists, so maybe it works anyway.
But use, “devastate.”
Decimate: reduce by number, not by 10,
because few examples only reduce by 10 or 10%.
Case in point- the “F” word. It has a bunch of different meanings.
Not one in ten people use decimate properly.
If a library looses 1/10 of its books has it been Dewey Decimated?
Units that lose 10% strength quickly in combat typically drop substantially in effectiveness. So, its a reasonable parallel.