[IronJack]

No. Decimation is NOT the elimination of 10 percent. That's the ORIGIN of the word, but it has expanded beyond its orginal meaning. I can be as much a language purist as anyone, but in this case, it's a lost cause. Nowadays, and for a considerable period of time, "decimation" has come to mean "great destruction" or "marked reduction in numbers." Only vestigially does it mean "a reduction by 1 in 10."

Now don't get me started on "medium/media" ...

[ThanhPhero]

Use of "decimation" by a purportedly educated person to mean "devastation" sounds and is IGNORANT. It is a public school phenomenon and its user should not be proud to claim he accepted public school limits without looking beyond what he was presented there. It is not a matter of "purism" in this case but of random use of adjectives because one doesn't know what a word actually means and decimation sounds kind of like destruction and some of those other big words and, gee, youse knows what I mean anyways.