Plan B Forum

m really getting tired of people using decimate as a way of saying destroy.

pres Obama started it when he said that al quaida leadership had been decimated. he was actually parsing words and was being snidely accurate, he had killed maybe one in ten of them...

...correct me if I m wrong, but decimation is the killing of 1 in every 10 , correct?

as in what the roman commanders did to troops that did not fight with courage or something like that, right?

That's old school.

wesw wrote:...correct me if I m wrong, but decimation is the killing of 1 in every 10 , correct?

You're thinking about decification, which is defined as one of every ten bowel movements.

that s old stool....

Unless he has been reincarnated, it started a long time before Obama:

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.

Many, if not most, dictionaries now place the extended meaning before the original, more precise meaning. This extension appears to have been accepted by Fowler and other usage gurus, who warn only not to use it to refer to virtually complete extinction or with percentages.

weeeeell, I don t know much latin, and the standard measuring system works better for construction than the metric system, but the metric system is pretty simple to calculate with and the literal meaning of decimate is fairly easy to decipher, so..., no matter where it started to be known as something different than what it means, I ll stick with what it really means.

eta- I did realize how decimate was used improperly, before Obama started the current round of misuse, so I should have written more carefully, thanks for the correction.

Then you will stick with a meaning that will require you never to use the word again. The practice of killing one in ten soldiers as punishment is no longer practiced in the world - so you will never have to worry about it! Splendid.

Now go and worry about something truly useful. For example, note how the word "fun" (a perfectly good and decent noun) is being turned into an adjective by stupid people who say, "it was so fun" instead of the correct form - "it was such fun".

verb: decimate; 3rd person present: decimates; past tense: decimated; past participle: decimated; gerund or present participle: decimating

1. kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of.
"the project would decimate the fragile wetland wilderness"
•drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something).
"plant viruses that can decimate yields"

2. historical
kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group.

wesw wrote:... no matter where it started to be known as something different than what it means, I ll stick with what it really means...

So, what does it really mean to post your thoughts on the web?

yes, meade, I ll stick with the meaning I said I would stick with.

scooter already covered most of the rest of your post

but it has been sooooo much fun hearing what I already knew..., again.

eta- ...and joe, it means that I don t feel like doing chores.....

wesw wrote:
eta- ...and joe, it means that I don t feel like doing chores.....

But I thought a post was a long, sturdy piece of timber or metal set upright in the ground and used to support something or as a marker and that a web is a network of fine threads constructed by a spider from fluid secreted by its spinnerets, used to catch its prey.

If he wants a word that sounds like "decimate", why not use "devastate" — so the comment wesw used would have read "...al quaida leadership had been devastated."
Although that makes it sound like you're going too far the other way, since most people think devastated = wiped out.  Maybe people should just use the appropriate words at the appropriate times?  I mean, if you've blown the crap out of something or someone, why not just say "we have inflicted significant damage" or "we have eliminated several key leaders" — or if you really want to sound warlike but still stay classy, "we have wreaked havoc on __________" — or something like that?

-"BB"-

Joe Guy wrote:

wesw wrote:
eta- ...and joe, it means that I don t feel like doing chores.....

But I thought a post was a long, sturdy piece of timber or metal set upright in the ground and used to support something or as a marker and that a web is a network of fine threads constructed by a spider from fluid secreted by its spinnerets, used to catch its prey.

I'm betting Scooter could probably cover it...