| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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3. Word Choice: New Uses, Common Confusion, and Constraints
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| § 91. decimate |
| Discipline was unbelievably severe in the Roman army. If a soldier on guard duty didn’t know the password, he was executed. If a cohort or legion mutinied, it was decimated, that is, the soldier standing in the first rank in the first file picked a number from one through ten out of a helmet, and the count off continued from that number. When the count off came to “ten” (decem in Latin), that soldier was executed, as was every tenth man after him; the other nine tenths got the message. Today people commonly extend the literal meaning of killing one tenth to the killing of any large percentage of a group. Sixty-six percent of the Usage Panel accepts this extension in the sentence The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war, even though it is common knowledge that the number of Jews killed was much greater than a tenth of the original population. But when the meaning is further extended to include large-scale destruction other than killing, as in The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the accident at Chernobyl, only 26 percent of the panel accepts the usage. | 1 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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