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.

@Blueyrocks , you lost me at " or whatever the fuck". Go away.

Wow. Are you joking?

The meaning of fortified can be deduced from the context; the meaning of decimated can't.

Aww, am I allowed to stay then? 😉

Deduced from the context, Trump clearly used decimated to mean destroyed, because Iran, like most things that can be decimated, can't be split into ten equal parts like a Roman legion.

Of course, Trump is a pompous buffoon. I'm not saying he used the word accurately. But the inaccuracy was mendacious self-aggrandizment, not accidental misuse.

Decimated means reduce by a 10th not split into 10 parts, so it could mean 'We destroyed 10 % of them.' or 'We destroyed a large proportion of them'.
The second meaning is weaker.

We live in a world where news is translated and the translation might not be able to interpret the context.

I entered 'We decimated the enemy' into an online translator and it returned 'We killed most of the enemy'.
I entered 'The Romans decimated the enemy' and it returned 'The Romans barked at the enemy'.

I am not making that up BTW.

I first heard the word used by my "O" Grade History teacher in the 1980s, in relation to collective punishment meted out by various militaries during the early 20th Century. So not as long ago as the Romans.

Wait, surely decimated means reduced TO a tenth, not BY a tenth?

You weren't alive within centuries of it having only the "original" meaning. You haven't lost anything.

No - see up-thread where this has already been discussed.

Well yes, there was a big thing about the word decimation about 50 years ago. I wrote that the Times to correct them, precocious child that I was. In those days they acknowledged letters and I got a postcard in response. But in fact I was wrong: the word now means to reduce drastically and the Roman military origins are pedantic history. Current usage is accepted by all dictionaries

It doesn't.

It's a term used when describing tithing.
The using it to mean destroying is fairly recent.

It's from the Latin decimatus, past participle of decimare, from decimus tenth.

DECIMATE Definition .

It has been used to mean that for hundreds of years. It's recorded as such over that time, and known as that. I knew it as that 40 years ago, and have never heard it used once in my life for any other usage (it would be extremely rare to need to use that word the other way).

But confusingly, the source you provide generally supports this. If there is something you want us to take from this link, it would be better to quote it because I must have missed it.

@nevernotmaybe , I knew the word from childhood because it was used when describing tithing.
The word is related to 10, as are decibel, decimetre and December.

I don't find it confusing but I wonder why people use a word with a specific meaning to mean something else.

The link was included to back up my post saying that it has more than one meaning.

I have saved this as a reminder to me.
I so nearly became person E on the fewer/ less distinction.

What is it about this particular word that means it pops up every so often in debates like this? I can read Latin pretty well - if you look at a page of Latin text, there will generally always be words that look familiar but mean something different to the modern English term derived from the original. Yet nobody gets upset about any except this particular word.

I had a colleague who insisted that decimate could only mean to reduce by 1 in 10. No amount of referring him to dictionaries would make a dent in his belief that anyone who disagreed was ignorant.

@Yuasa , there are other words that I could mention but I've not seen threads about them.

"I had a colleague who insisted that decimate could only mean to reduce by 1 in 10. No amount of referring him to dictionaries would make a dent in his belief that anyone who disagreed was ignorant."
To me, decimate means reduce by a tenth but I can accept that other people might use it to mean something else.

"They are decimated, both militarily and economically and in every other way."
could mean reduced by a tenth or annihilated. Without the preceding sentence, it lacks clarity.

I loved this but surely it's valour? - winces -

Perhaps it is because it’s a word which very obviously seems to have a numeric significance?
Similarly it really doesn’t seem at all right that words such as ‘quadrant’ and ‘quarter’ no longer necessarily come in fours - does anyone else live in or near a town which has in the last few years had a random number of areas designated as ‘quarters’?

It's a hill I'm prepared to die on.

I think you meant to say that it is a hill on which you are prepared to die.

The orange overlord has been threatening to take out their desalination plants. If that happens they could well be desiccated.

I doubt Shakespeare, or indeed Chaucer, ever degraded language by mistaking the meaning of words thus losing specificity and nuance. Despite my rogue extra 'as' (apologies for my proofreading error), I used 'not so much ... as ...' rather than 'instead of' to try to soften the prevalence of degrading versus evolving.

I agreed with you on 'decimating'.

I gave examples of loss of specific meaning. There is no longer a unique noun for an abbreviation pronounceable as a word, now that it is used to mean any initialism (though thankfully 'backronym' seems more resistant). A falsehood repeated so often it resembles the truth can no longer be called a factoid without being misconstrued as true. We might feel justified in deploring that.