Pedantic, but "decimate" has the primary meaning of "reduce by a large percentage", based on the historical reference to a particular Roman practice of killing 1 in 10 of a group as a means of collective punishment; it does not generally (i.e., outside of the context of that specific historical practice) mean to reduce either by or to one tenth.
That's lovely but your post isn't really contributing. bmelton was pointing out an actual misuse* . "Decimate" can mean either large percentage or the traditional 10% drop, it does not mean 90% drop. Your post moves into pointless word argument territory.
* or perhaps a pun masquerading as misuse in a way that invites 'correction', an utterly terrifying category of pun I hadn't even considered before
> That's lovely but your post isn't really contributing.
To the extent that is true, I kind of thought I addressed that with the first word of the post.
> bmelton was pointing out an actual misuse
And I was pointing out an actual error in bmelton's description of the actual misuse (which -- see below -- is repeated in your description.)
> "Decimate" can mean either large percentage or the traditional 10% drop
No, it can't. It can mean reducing by a large percentage, or it can be reference to actually killing 10% of a group of people as a form of collective punishment. It does not mean reduce by 10% in any general sense any more than it means reduce to 10% in any general sense (though the latter is more likely to be within its general meaning than the former.)
> Your post moves into pointless word argument territory.
Well, I would say that tptacek's point was entirely clear despite the misuse, and that both bmelton and my responses were provided with accurate warnings by their submitters as being pedantic ("overly concerned with formal rules and trivial points of learning.")
While I acknowledge, and generally believe in the evolution of language, I refuse to succumb to the trend of colloquial usage coming to mean the opposite of a word's original intent.
To illustrate the point better, "literally" has now also been defined to mean "figuratively" in the common parlance, which means that, sadly, there is no appropriate word for literally that is unambiguous.
Similarly so with decimate. Its originalist intent is to reduce by one tenth, so, colloquial adoption aside, I reject any definition that resembles its polar opposite.
Clearly, the colloquial usage, as tptacek has done, is acceptable to many, but if words are intended to actually mean things, instead of just send an appropriate contextual vibe, then there should be some degree of rigidity to language that pushes back against its less meaningful and more ambiguous adoption.
