Ev idence for DECIMATE ( 'one in ten')

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 09:19:54PM -0500, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> [Resending with amended Subject line.]
>
> At 1/7/2008 02:57 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
> >>...
> >so some people have an opinion about the meaning of "decimate", but
> >there's no evidence to indicate that the word actually has that
> >meaning; no one seems to *use* the word that way.  meanwhile, there's
> >tons of evidence, from a great many speakers and writers, in a wide
> >variety of contexts,  that the word has a 'greatly reduce' sense.
>
> >>...
> >once again: this meaning doesn't occur even there.  it's *mentioned*
> >there, but not (so far as i know) ever *used* there.
>
> Arnold, doesn't the second group of Doug's quotations, for "kill 10%
> of", change this?

I'm not Arnold, but I am someone who's long been interested in
the usage history of _decimate_. And in my opinion, no, it
doesn't change it, or it barely changes it.

Yes, there's a difference between "_decimate_ has never been
found in the nonhistorical sense 'kill 10% of'" and "Using
full-text databases and scanning the entire body of English
writing, we can find three examples of _decimate_ in the
nonhistorical sense 'kill 10% of'".  But it's a distinction
without a difference. The frequency of this sense is
statistically zero. I suppose it's mildly interesting that
yes, there have finally been found real examples of this, but
still, in the grand scheme of things, it's irrelevant. If I
were revising OED's entry now I would omit this sense or
discuss it only in a note, probably following MWDEU in
criticizing Murray for making it up.

Whether these examples are real or accidental (by "accidental"
I mean that the writer was not intending to use it to refer to
a 10% killing specifically, but just happened to use the
'cause great harm to' sense in this context), it remains the
case that this usage occurs almost exclusively[1], as Arnold
says, in the insistence that the usage exists, rather than in
the usage itself.

[1] And by "almost exclusively" I really mean 'in every case
but the three (or whatever) that have been discovered with
great effort', not 'more often than not' or 'most of the
time'.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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