Decimated. You keep using that word. It does not mean what you think it means.

[Mochudubh]

I know Trump's an idiot and there are far more serious concerns in the world at the moment but this had me shouting at the telly.

We've beaten and completely decimated Iran. They are decimated, both militarily and economically and in every other way.”

So Iran is 90% sound then. Idiot.

Exactly this. It drives my other half mad but language evolves whether we like it or not and now decimate doesn’t have to be such an exact meaning.

as an aside I did comment he likes that word as he used it twice in quick succession!

I agree

That is an utterly terrifying thought.

It's a slippery slope.

In the Roman army, decimation was the practice of killing one in ten soldiers, as a punishment for cowardice but, even in the days when I learnt this in A level Latin, the meaning was morphing into ‘devastation’.

Yep.

It's hill you have been wrong on, for around 300 years before you were born.

Julian Barnes expressed a similar sentiment on Desert Island Discs; he also explained its Roman origin.

No fan of Trump, but I agree with this. The etymology of a word doesn't dictate its usage or its meaning.

Ah, the Humpty Dumpty approach to language: 'when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

No, decimated meant one in ten killed, not one in ten left alive. However, it is a word whose meaning has fundamentally changed from its original use and does now mean extensively destroyed or killed.

No, it means to kill one in ten.

This is true. I think it harks back to ancient Rome where if a soldier of a cohort of 100 men did something wrong then 1 in 10 were picked randomly from that cohort to be beaten to death by their comrades.
ie the cohort was reduced by 1 in 10, it was decimated (decimated being Latin for 10).

What’s the opposite? Language doesn’t evolve and all meanings are stuck at which point exactly?

I just came here for the Princess Bride quote :)

Cambridge dictionary disagrees with you

Oops well spotted.

The way people are talking, it sounds like its usage in English for the original meaning is ancient.

In their evolutionary timescale they basically both started around the same time.

Before riding into battle, the true pendant should always seek a stalwart ally to join them under their banner (the OED, Roget’s Thesaurus and Murphy’s English Grammar in Use are all reliable veterans of many a conflict).

In the absence of any such ally, discretion becomes the better part of valor, the pedant may be well advised to depart the field and live to fight another day.

I think the same every time he says it! I have to stop mentioning it though because my family think I’m a pedantic weirdo.

I'll raise your "decimated", and bring you "forensic".

Usages change. Much as I dislike Trump, most people consider "decimated" to mean "destroyed" or "demolished", these days.

Personally, I would have used obliterated.

This is one of those times when the shift in meaning actually makes a word far more useful.

Let not the right be the enemy of the good 😉

I do feel this statement is an insult to buffoons

But when it’s used in a military context, it’s incorrect. If I was using it to describe how the squirrel decimates my garden it’s acceptable but I’d expect a world leader to get it when talking about war.