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

[Ben Zimmer]

I wrote about "decimate" for OUPblog back in 2008:
https://blog.oup.com/2008/01/decimate/

Quoting myself:

---
Richard Grant White, one of the most popular commentators on language in
the nineteenth century, was griping about it as far back as 1868, in an
article in _The Galaxy_ entitled "Words and Their Uses," as well as a
widely read book of the same name published two years later. [...] White's
observations on _decimate_ grew out of the writing of Civil War
correspondents, as in: "The troops, although fighting bravely, were
terribly decimated, and gave way." Because this sense does not accord with
the "one-tenth" etymology, Grant argued that "to use _decimation_ as a
general phrase for great slaughter is simply ridiculous." Following White’s
cue, Edward A. Freeman wrote in the 1881 _Princeton Review_ that "the word
is dragged in without any thought of its real meaning, without so much as
any thought of the number ten."

Links:
White 1868: https://books.google.com/books?id=xi8ZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA236
White 1870:
https://archive.org/details/wordstheirusespa00whi/page/104/mode/2up
Freeman 1881: https://books.google.com/books?id=9rARAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA263

--bgz

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
>
> 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
>
>

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