I'm reading a good nonfiction book, The Secret Lives of Color, by Kassia St. Clair, which is an account of pigments, colors, their names, and their social history. It's very good.
But on page 103, she writes: "the city was bombed by Allied troops, and the museum the room had been held was decimated." It makes me want to scream. "No! No! Decimated doesn't mean that!"
But I think it does, now.
The original meaning of "decimate" was "to terrorize or punish a group of people by killing every tenth person." That is, to kill 10% of the population.
Gradually, it came to mean a terrible loss of population, often much more than 10%. For example, "in the 1800s, the buffalo herds of North America were decimated by hunters."
But now, it is being used to mean "any terrible, nearly complete destruction, of people, property, or anything;" in this case, a museum building.
I don't like it at all, and the American Heritage Dictionary's entry, https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=decimate indicates that they don't like it, either. They give, as a meaning, "To inflict great destruction or damage on: The storm decimated the region," but they note it as having a "usage problem," and they say in a usage note that a "Some 36 percent accepted [a similar sentence] in 2005, up from 26 percent in 1988, but still a decided minority." That was in 2005, and the next time they review it, it will probably be higher.
What this shows is that, one: English evolves. Two, English dictionaries record usage as it exists, and as it changes they acknowledge the change.
Oh, sounds like an awesome book, thanks for the recommendation, Dan!
Yes, I've read that in English you can say decimate when the verbs destroy, raze, exterminate and obliterate are not enough. Doesn't make much sense if you ask me but, after all, who says that languages always have to be very logical? In Russian, however, the word децимация (decimation; never a verb for some reason) means what it used to mean originally: executing one soldier out of ten for deserting. In one book about the Mongol invasion of Rus' I even came across the term "децимация наоборот" ("reverse decimation"): the Mongols were said to execute a group of ten if one soldier of the unit deserted (which is probably a myth based on Carpini's description of Mongol army but anyway).
There's evolution in progress all the time. A few examples that come to mind:
Aggravate has all but lost its "real" meaning of 'worsen', and now seems to mean 'irritate'.
These days, most people seem to think that infer means 'imply', rather than 'conclude'. I've even read posts on this site where professional teachers have written, "This expression infers that....". Ugh.
Insinuate seems to have lost most of its meaning. A native speaker wrote an explanation of a positive comment here not long ago using the phrase, "If you say this, you are insinuating that you ....". The non-native OP was confused and asked what was unpleasant about the comment. A clear case of a non-native English learner knowing English better than the native!
Interestingly to me, Merriam-Webster is more conservative in the sense that they do not include "imply" among the meanings for "infer," and they, too have a usage note:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/infer
'Sir Thomas More is the first writer known to have used both "infer" and "imply" in their approved senses in 1528 (with "infer" meaning "to deduce from facts" and "imply" meaning "to hint at"). He is also the first to have used "infer" in a sense close in meaning to imply (1533). Both of these uses of "infer" coexisted without comment until some time around the end of World War I. Since then, the "indicate" and "hint or suggest" meanings of infer have been frequently condemned as an undesirable blurring of a useful distinction. The actual blurring has been done by the commentators. The "indicate" sense of infer, descended from More's use of 1533, does not occur with a personal subject. When objections arose, they were to a use with a personal subject (which is now considered a use of the "suggest, hint" sense of infer). Since dictionaries did not recognize this use specifically, the objectors assumed that the "indicate" sense was the one they found illogical, even though it had been in respectable use for four centuries. The actual usage condemned was a spoken one never used in logical discourse. At present the condemned "suggest, hint" sense is found in print chiefly in letters to the editor and other informal prose, not in serious intellectual writing. The controversy over the "suggest, hint" sense has apparently reduced the frequency with which the "indicate" sense of infer is used.'
My reactions are that I don't understand this note--and that Merriam-Webster's definitions are more conservative, yet their usage note is more liberal, than American Heritage!
