! DECIMATE

[mik3cap]

Okay people. Please help me with this one. Even PBS's NOVA is wrong on it, and it's worrying me.

Decimate == REDUCE by ONE TENTH. To decimate something is to destroy ten percent of it.

People CONSTANTLY misuse this word. They should be using the word "devastate" instead.

DEVASTATE, not decimate.

You may now return to your previously scheduled program.

Comments

[bronzite.livejournal.com]

Used to. Still does. Also has another meaning to mean "significantly reduce." Merriam-Webster agrees.

English may be a technical language, but its still a language in motion, and meanings migrate over time.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sorry, but, if that's true, it's because people are getting stupider and M-W is slacking. Deci- still means "one tenth". I'd rather people bother to learn to use prefixes, especially ones used in scientific systems, than make up their own shit because they're too stupid to use words properly or know how the SI works.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

There's no excuse for saying "The Spanish Inquisition decimated the Mayan culture by burning all their works". "Significantly reduce" is not the same as "totally destroy". This is all just intellectual slippage and it's pissing me off.

[treyvana.livejournal.com]

huh. You know, that never even occurred to me.

I shall correct it in my brain and try to use it only in appropriate situations.

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<insert [...] know'>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

huh. You know, that never even occurred to me.

I shall correct it in my brain and try to use it only in appropriate situations.

<insert 'the more you know' star here>

:)

[saintentreri.livejournal.com]

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

WIN

[kaetaur13.livejournal.com]

One great thing about the English language is that once enough people use a word incorrectly long enough they become correct.

[rovanda.livejournal.com]

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=decimate
dec-i-mate   [des-uh-meyt] –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

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.

It's always interesting to look further into things I never particularly thought about. Depending on how severely you disagree with usage determining definition, you could probably argue that "decimate" should only be used in the historical context of disciplining Roman troops...

You must love the French :) They have the Académie Française to regulate the French language, dictating what is considered acceptable grammar and vocabulary.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

Inexactness of language is inexactness of thought. Read Orwell's "1984" for details. It's doubleplusgood.

[rovanda.livejournal.com]

Jack Vance has an excellent novel based on the idea that language can determine thought called The Languages of Pao. It's quite good.

I never managed to get through 1984 - I slogged through the beginning and then skipped to the end. I found We by Yevgeny Zamyatin to be a much more readable and poignant story in the same dystopian vein.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

Agreed that Orwell is dry, but there is seriously deep thought and meaning in his work. His political acumen is unparalleled, he predicted sixty years worth of degeneration in political thought and governance (though it could be argued that his work may have been the model that people in power followed to bring us to this point).

1984 was actually just Orwell building fiction around an essay he wrote; it may be worthwhile to ignore the story and just read his essay:

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

He invented Newspeak as a way to illustrate his points in this essay.

[karmadrome.livejournal.com]

This is going to be one of those internecine struggles, isn't it?

[rovanda.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I'll take a look at it :)

[rovanda.livejournal.com]

Very interesting essay! His criticism of the way language is twisted to obscure meaning rather than communicate meaning reminds me of one of George Carlin's shows - where he talks about how a phrase with a very clear meaning, like "shell shock" gets twisted around into something dry and meaningless, like "post traumatic stress disorder."

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

I know if he were around today, he'd rip the shit out of FOX news...

[antryg-windrose.livejournal.com]

Try "The Giver" regarding precision of speech.

[kitteridge.livejournal.com]

I am woefully ignorant in these areas but as I understand it there's a power struggle over those who seek to expand the English language, and those who want to keep things pretty much where they are. M-W adheres to the "if it's used incorrectly long enough, may as well consider it valid" territory, and I believe a group like Oxford is not.

But I will promise to promote your "decimate" usage if you will help me get people to stop using "impact" as a verb (i.e. "people were impacted by the study").

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

Can I still say "we were impacted by an asteroid?"

[kitteridge.livejournal.com]

Only if I can say "and the populace was decimated."

[mighty-1.livejournal.com]

They should make a Transformer named "Decimator" that comes apart into 10 smaller robots.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

OMG YES JEFFO MAKE ONE!!!

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

This is a singularly awesome idea.

[gower.livejournal.com]

>Inexactness of language is inexactness of thought.

After some amount of years after a word changes you have to give up on that, though, like "nice" no longer meaning "fastidious" or "buxom" no longer meaning "obedient."

"I want you kids to be nice and buxom!"

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

What are the roots of nice and buxom? Do those pieces get used differently and specifically in different words, like deci- does, or was it just sloppiness?

[gower.livejournal.com]

Think of buxsome as bow-some (willing to bow to). Like all of the best words, it's from old english.

Nice has obscure origins, probably in old French. It also means extravagent, lecherous, or foolish. But as usually glossed in the English Renaissance, it's "being overly attentive to detail." I don't know if anyone knows a clear origin for the word. At least my OED doesn't.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

As a computer dude, this gives me a greater appreciation for using the "nice" command in Unix to pay more attention to a particular process in the operating system!

[gower.livejournal.com]

Are you serious? That's awesome! I have to tell my class that.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

Totally, google it up. Nice allows you to change process priority... and is used as a verb as in "nice this process".