this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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Pedantic as hell but when someone uses decimated wrong, folks want it to mean annihilated but it doesn't
What's the issue?
Not the person you replied to, but I'm guessing that they're a stickler for the original meaning, which is "to reduce by a 10th", hence the "deci" in decimate. It comes from a military discipline practice that could only have been invented by the Romans. The force to be punished is divided into groups of 10, and each group is given a bag containing 9 white pebbles and one black pebble. They each take turns reaching into the bag blindly and grabbing a pebble. The people with the white pebbles are then each given a cudgel and ordered to bludgeon the poor bastard with the black pebble to death, hence reducing their overall numbers by a tenth, or decimating them.
The issue is that this second definition is another tragic loss to ignorance that led us to literally have no way to refer to things literally any longer: prolonged misuse (@[email protected] ably explained the proper use) has led to another vague word that used to have a precise meaning.