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Comment by mistercow | Hacker News Reader

>But Zynga’s share price got decimated over the past year.

Well no, not really. I mean, yes, I guess it technically did. Then it got decimated again. And then it got decimated 12 more times.

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I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle with "decimate." Glad to see there's somebody else on HN still fighting the good fight though.

What are you trying to say? The word was used quite correctly.

Decimate means to remove 1 out of 10, so a decimated share price would have fallen by only 10%, technically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)#Current...

You are not even "technically" correct and I have to say it's really annoying seeing this come up again and again in every HN thread where someone uses the word. Even setting aside that, yes, usage dictates meaning in English, the OED has included the definition against which you rail for 350 years.

You're wrong. And you're the worst kind of wrong: pedantically wrong. Please stop.

It's basically a skunked term at this point. No matter which sense you use it in, some subset of your readers is going to take umbrage.

There are other, better, words available that can take its place.

There are better words, sure, but if you're going to be That Guy Who Literally-Literally Everyone Hates And Nobody Wants To Ever Talk To...be right.

Because, I mean, if you're going to be That Guy etc. etc., being right is close to the only thing you've got left.

I'm not saying I'd bring this up in casual conversation. Just that it's a word I personally choose not to use in my writing.

It used to mean that. A long, long time ago. Not for several centuries.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the etymology of words is intensely interesting. It always makes me happy to learn how words were originally used and how that meaning changed – but all that doesn’t help you decide what a word actually means right now.

The fact that people still argue argue about the only-several-centuries-old newfangled meaning of this word signifies to me that I probably shouldn't use it in my writing. If I use it to mean "reduce by one tenth" most of my readers will be confused; if I use it to mean "destroy," a vocal minority will be annoyed.

Uhm, no you do not get to move the goal posts.

Argue against using the word. Don’t dare argue that it has a different meaning than it actually has.

Also, I think I will increase my use of decimate. If it pisses off those annoying pedants (who are perfectly aware of what is being communicated and won’t be the slightest bit confused) I will be happy. I successfully communicated and pissed off people I don’t like. Yay!

> people I don’t like

But I like you...

> I successfully communicated and pissed off people I don’t like. Yay!

You'll make a lot of friends with that attitude.

Oh, I don’t want to be friends with people who are pedants about stuff like this.

The battle was lost hundreds of years before you were born. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first quotation for the loose "to destroy or remove a large proportion of" meaning of "decimate" in 1663.

Yeah, I know. It still strikes me as an odd usage though.

Pacificly, schedule a biannual renumeration review. Uttered near me. My happiness was decimated (modern usage).

Linguo... IS dead.

What's the battle? I'm seeing two definitions:

1. Kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage of. 2. Drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something): "plant viruses that can decimate yields".

The battle is that usage 2 is relatively young (being only a few hundred years old), and some people object to it.

Lots of words change meanings, and hundreds of years is usually enough time for a new meaning to become totally unobjectionable. But I think the main issue here is that the word so clearly derives from the Latin for "ten" that it just sticks out like a sore thumb.

English is not Latin. Please, just accept this.

The Spanish word diezmar, shockingly enough, also means to destroy (or cut by a tenth), even though it looks like it's got a ten in there, too.

And I bet that word sounds odd to some native Spanish speakers, and they object to it on etymological grounds. Just like decimate.

the italian word "decimare" also means both

I'm a 35 year old latin and I have never, ever heard anybody use that word, not on TV, not on books, not on nothing. I had to look it up too see if it was real. Is a weird word, please don't use.

Diesmo, on the other hand is quite common and I guess you can say that diesmar is the act of giving the tenth of your profits to the church. Still, diezmar is a dead word.

Instead we use decimo for tenth and decimar for destroy.

Cool, though I wonder what the origin of decimar is. :)

As others have pointed out, the "battle" is actually against both usage 1 and 2: the original meaning[1] is to kill only 10% of a legion (etc) as punishment for some misdeed. It's the large reduction implied in current usage of decimate that gets pedants all riled up.

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/decimate#Etymology

Oops, I misread the comment I was replying to.

He's referring to the Roman martial practice of decimation, which I believe is source of the word. (As a Roman history lover, it is a word that bothers me as well)

Now that your position has been decimated by history, you could focus your efforts on one of my pet peeves that's been appearing a lot on HN: "binary blob"

Type either "blob" or "binary lob." PLEASE!

What? The b in blob does not stand for binary.

Binary Large OBject.