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

[Laurence Horn]

Nice to know that during a recent budget-inspired cutback our departmental
faculty was indeed literally decimated--assuming "kill" is not itself part
of the original literal meaning, just reduction by 10%.

Maybe part of the confusion is over whether the literal meaning was "reduce
by 10%" or "reduce to 10%").

LH

On Wed, May 13, 2026 at 10:23 AM Jonathan Lighter <
00001aad181a2549-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:

> 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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>

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