You stop it. What it means is that people use words incorrectly. If you don’t think words are important, you write a contract where I pay you $1 million dollars and after you’ve signed it, let me legally change just on word in the contract. If one word doesn’t matter, you should have no issue with that.
A smarter person would stay out of this argument, but it is an issue I find interesting, so I’ll stick my nose in it against my better judgment. If I recall correctly, “decimate” goes back to a Latin term, specifically regarding a military punishment in which one in ten legionaries would be executed. So yeah, it literally means the loss of 10%.
But that was two thousand years ago. For better or worse, words evolve. Without question, I’d have to say I’ve seen “decimate” used in its sloppy sense (as meaning a whole lot killed) much more than it’s literal sense. One can fight it (more power to ya), but I don’t expect that trend to reverse. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. If I ask my secretary to make a copy of a report on our Konica Minolta machine, should I expect her to jump all over me if I ask her to get me 20 Xeroxes? We know what we mean, and that’s just fine.
And on a separate issue, kudos to the wag who brought up Dennis Rodman in relationship to this story (for those who don’t know, his nickname was “The Worm”).
Word usage and meanings change over time. Contract language is written to a very specific lexicon and context, like other technical dialects. Not at all relevant to general language usage. I used to lodge objections as you are, but have now lived long enough to see that an absolutist approach is inappropriate outside the specialties.