[Ads-l] to decimate: a "recent" bugaboo

[Jonathan Lighter]

Now that you mention it, I was also warned against "dilapidated" in the
seventh grade. Thanks for reminding me.

BTW, Fowler (1922) accepts the usual sense as long as it applies to
something that can be "reckoned by number": "The population was decimated
by plague."

But he frowns on its application to other things.

The truly radical anti-"decimate" taboo seems to insist that it can "only"
mean "reduce by ten per cent (or so)."

Except in writings about the Roman army, this sense is virtually never used
by anybody.

I believe the Roman practice it describes was uncommon in the first place,
and Roman writers rarely mention it.

JL

On Wed, May 13, 2026 at 11:36 AM Gordon, Matthew <gordonmj at missouri.edu>
wrote:

> Richard Bailey mentions the case of ‘decimate’ among other examples of
> “parlor etymology” in his book on 19th century English though he gives no
> examples of complaints about it. He also mentions ‘dilapidated’ (which,
> parlor etymologists argue, should be applied only to stone structures), and
> he provides an extended account of a courtroom cross-examination in which
> the witness, a doctor, is humiliated when the lawyer points out the
> absurdity of his having diagnosed a male patient with hysteria (b/c of its
> Greek root meaning “womb”).
>
> I wonder if the survival of the etymological fallacy with regard to
> ‘decimate’ is due to the enduring obsession (among some people) with the
> Roman empire.
>
> Matt
>
>
> From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of
> Jonathan Lighter <00001aad181a2549-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Date: Wednesday, May 13, 2026 at 9:23 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Subject: to decimate: a "recent" bugaboo
>
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> One of the favorite words of the President of the United States is
> "decimate," meaning, as MW has it, "to reduce drastically especially in
> number" and "to cause great destruction or harm to."  He uses it
> emphatically each time he mentions Iranian losses of materiel or capacity.
>
> Just this morning a distinguished MSNOW commentator observed somewhat
> condescendingly that, of course, the President is misusing the word,
> because what it "really means" is to reduce by only  one tenth. (I was
> taught this very emphatically in the seventh grade, btw.)
>
> Not news to members of this list. However, I was curious as to when it
> became fashionable not just to criticize but to smirk with superiority at
> this usage of "decimate," which OED documents "in standard English" from at
> least 1660.
>
> Surely this was a public gripe of eighteenth-century grammarians and
> Latinists.
>
> But apparently not. I may be missing something, but searches for
> "decimate" + "Latin" + "one tenth" in Newspapers.com, InternetArchive, and
> Google Books reveals no objection earlier than the 1880s.
>
> A writer in the British _Cornhill Magazine_(1885, p. 628, Google Books)
> felt it necessary to observe, under the critical rubric of "Superfine
> English" that "even when one uses 'decimate' metaphorically, in the
> rough sense of to punish severely, or to destroy a very large proportion,
> there is surely nothing wrong or very out-of-the-way in its usage."  He is
> reacting to the strong objection of  an unnamed contemporary, whom he
> scores as "one of the most phenomenally bad writers of the present
> generation."
>
> Yet by 1905, London U. expected matriculants to eschew the wider usage:
>
> 1905 _Matriculation Directory_ (London Univ.) XXXIX 83 [GB]: Matriculation
> Examination, 1905... _Decimate_. "The field of turnips was decimated:
> scarce a root was left untouched." To _decimate_ properly means to reduce
> _by_ one-tenth, and not to reduce _to_ one-tenth.
>
> (Other words "misused" included "future," "antiquarian," and "mutual.")
>
> It would be good to know the identity of "one of the most phenomenally bad
> writers" of the mid-to-later nineteenth century" so as to enjoy some of his
> wretched prose, but I haven't tried to track him down.
>
> It's curious, at any rate, that the super-prescriptivist objection to
> "decimate" remains in educated circles long after others, like the split
> infinitive, have been consigned to the dust.
>
> JL
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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