I've always (mis?)understood decimate to mean "reduce to one tenth of original size." This definition seems to fit better with the catastrophic implications of present usage. Reducing to 90% doesn't seem so horrendous as reducing to 10%. I know the Roman usage was clearly to kill every tenth rebellious soldier as punishment, but has the word evolved to mean nine-tenths? I am mindful of the linguistic rule that usage determines propriety, not the other way around.
Must... resist... temptation...
Welcome, Catman! Your right, of course... but it has been put forth, as well, that there is little use for rules... linguistc or otherwise.
CatMan:
Yes, the word has evolved to mean reduce by a large proportion. Here's what my dictionary's usage note says:
Decimate orig. meant "to kill every tenth person," but its English meaning has been exended to include the destruction of any large proportion of a group, as in Fire, famine, and sword decimated the population. Many, however, still avoid the use of decimate in describing the destruction of a singler person, an entire group, or a specified percentage other than 10%.
Welcome to our fold. I hope you stick around. I mean, what else would a CatMan do?
TEd
Good old Faldage taught me something about this very recently. In addition to killing every tenth man,
all those not executed where shipped in small groups to other units, where they were also punished by
loss of seniority, and thus put in front line where they were llikely to be killed.
So the whole unit was abolished, so that decimation meant total destruction of that unit.Thanks,Faldage
Bill:
Yeah, I remember that. I also remember thinking when I learned about decimation that under the circumstances killing only every tenth rebellious soldier was sort of lenient, particularly for the Romans.
Jeez, can you imagine the feeling of helpless rage a soldier felt when he was about to be killed as one of the arbitrarily-chosen 1/10th? Kinda makes losing at bingo seem like small potatoes.
> but has the word evolved to mean nine-tenths? I am mindful of the linguistic rule that usage determines propriety, not the other way around.
Howdy, CatMan, or is it Eris? You certainly threw the golden apple in with your first post. As it happens, the OED apparently records the earliest written examples of today's "extended" mening of decimate as occurring in the early 1800s, so there is no member of this board, no matter how advanced in years, whose parents were alive when this particular shift happened. Perhaps in a few years time, when we celebrate the bicentennial of this evolution, the arch-prescriptivists will be ready to concede defeat on this one word. Will that be too soon for your taste, wwh?
"When I was your age, we had the great English vowel shift, and we had to carry each vowel by hand through the snow, and it was uphill both ways! And all we had to keep was warm were baked potatoes in our pockets, and that's what we ate for lunch, only by then it was cold, but we were glad to have it."
How come everybody's picking on me? (Charley Brown). When I first got involved in this over
a year ago, I did not have advantage of tsuwm's OED3 showing change far earlier than I
realized. And I never heard Faldage's point until he made it. I have no love for prescriptivists,
just a passion for le mot juste. Odio et contemno the slobs.
Soo ... apart from decimate, what can a Catman do?
Sorry, just couldn't resist it ...
"When I was your age, we had the great English vowel shift, and we had to carry each vowel by hand through the snow, and it was uphill both ways! And all we had to keep was warm were baked potatoes in our pockets, and that's what we ate for lunch, only by then it was cold, but we were glad to have it."
Still got the cold Alex?!
Welcome to the club, TEd.