I was reading something the other day - it doesn't matter what, because this error is quite widespread - where the author said that a group of people had been "decimated" when he really meant "annihilated."
Decimation has a terrible reputation. "They were decimated! Oh, how horrible!" But it really means nothing more than the loss of one thing in ten. Think, folks! Think about that "deci" business! If you have ten trees in your front yard and you cut down one, you've decimated your front yard. The word actually comes from a disciplinary technique used in the Roman army, where every tenth man in a military unit would be executed if the unit had dishonored itself in certain specific ways.
Not that I want any group of people I'm in to suffer decimation, by any means, nor am I arguing that we should he happy with decimation because it only represents a 10% casualty rate.
But I do wish people would stop saying "decimation" when they mean something else. It's like going into a restaurant and asking for "tire tread" when you really want "spaghetti".
Is That All?
11 years ago
2 comments:
umm... since I was embarrassed because I have used the word "decimate" in the manner you have described, I looked it up. As with most words, the meaning changed over time. Time in this case being about 400 years.
dec-i-mate
verb (used with object), -mat·ed, -mat·ing. 1. to destroy a great number or proportion of: The population was decimated by a plague.
2. to select by lot and kill every tenth person of.
3. Obsolete. to take a tenth of or from.
[Origin: 1590–1600; < L decimātus, ptp. of decimāre to punish every tenth man chosen by lot, v. deriv. of decimus tenth, deriv. of decem ten; see ate1]
—Related forms
dec·i·ma·tion, noun
dec·i·ma·tor, noun
—Usage note The earliest English sense of decimate is “to select by lot and execute every tenth soldier of (a unit).” The extended sense “destroy a great number or proportion of” developed in the 19th century: Cholera decimated the urban population. Because the etymological sense of one-tenth remains to some extent, decimate is not ordinarily used with exact fractions or percentages: Drought has destroyed (not decimated) nearly 80 percent of the cattle.
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.
I hew to the Roman meaning out of a misplaced sense of amazement at what the Romans managed to do without cars, email, toaster ovens, or infotainment.
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