>It's a bit like decimate, where the commonly-accepted meaning (and usage) is sigificantly different to the true meaning of "reduce by a tenth". These days (over the last 10 years) the original meaning has been relegated to a second-rate alternative in most dictionaries.



Oh, please! I may be only a stranger here, but even I know that the OED shows citations using the currently-accepted definition of decimate as far back as the 1830s. The change is hardly a recent phenomenon, and if anyone is going to complain about the shift in meaning of decimate, I will feel compelled to introduce that one to a nice woman I know. Shift happens people, get over it.