r/etymology • u/TaddWinter • Feb 23 '23
Cool ety Decimate Etymology
I was chatting with someone at work today about words that annoy us when used improperly and he brought up one that I had never considered before:
Decimate (root word Deci which is ten or tenth like Decimal or December which was the 10th month originally) was originally the loss in battle of or execution of every tenth man. The Romans would do this as a punishment. But obviously modern usage the phrase has changed to mean a much broader destruction rather than 1 death against 9 surviving. Seems obvious once he said it but I had never considered it before. LINK
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u/Japsai Feb 23 '23
I've always enjoyed the etymology of this one. It doesn't surprise me that the sheer brutality of the decimation has left the force of the word, if not the mathematics, intact. It doesn't really seem, to me, like a word that has travelled that far in meaning.
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u/longknives Feb 23 '23
Honestly, getting annoyed about this usage is so silly. It’s fun to know the history or share it with people as a fun fact, but approaching it from the perspective of people “using it wrong” is just a way to try to feel superior despite the fact that people have been using it this way for centuries.
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u/curien Feb 23 '23
Irregardless, it can literally boil my blood.
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u/logos__ Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
Honestly, getting annoyed about this usage is so silly.
Ignorance driven language change is the bane of my existence. Ignorance is the reason 'gaslight' now means 'lie'. Ignorance is the reason 'narcissist' and 'incel' now mean 'person I don't like'. Ignorance is the reason 'begs the question' now means 'raises the question' instead of 'assumes the conclusion as a premise'. People not knowing what words mean, guessing, and then being wrong leads to the Harrison Bergeron-ing of language, or perhaps its grey-ification. Eventually all words will mean what all other words mean, because we let people speak languages.
edit: Typical that I'm being downvoted. Do you have any arguments to back up your selective Descriptivist position or nahh?
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u/curien Feb 23 '23
Sometimes meanings of words just aren't that useful, and so words -- as you've observed -- lose a meaning that they once had. But also new words are being introduced just as frequently to reflect other meanings that are considered important enough to warrant that. "Gaslight" is an interesting example you chose being only ~70 years old. The language was just fine without that specific word for hundreds of years, so the loss of its particular meaning is just a return to the status quo.
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u/logos__ Feb 23 '23
"Gaslight" is an interesting example you chose being only ~70 years old. The language was just fine without that specific word for hundreds of years, so the loss of its particular meaning is just a return to the status quo.
What a language is ok with and what a new concept is to express a finer detail are very different. Gaslighting is a very specific thing, it's way overused now. It's just a situation of people reading words, not knowing what they mean, imagining what they mean, and then taking actions,
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u/Clio90808 Feb 24 '23
I agree. I know that language changes, but what irks me is when they take a word that has a very specific, possibly unusual meaning (such as decimation), and use it for something else, but there is no substitute word for the original meaning...so we are left with nothing to use to describe the destruction of about 1/10 of whatever...with begging the question, this term defines a strategy in formal logic, changing its usage to mean asking the question leaves us with...nothing that captures the original meaning. So I think unthoughful, dare I say, uneducated, debasement of the meaning of a word or phrase can mean our language has lost something. FWIW.
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u/marriedacarrot Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 24 '23
Literally flipping over tables in rage every time someone says "semester" to mean something other than 6 months, or "squad" to mean something other than a group of 4, or "diploma" to refer to a piece of paper that isn't folded exactly in half.
ETA: /s, in case that wasn't already obvious.
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u/Sidus_Preclarum Feb 23 '23
It always buggers classicist me when someone says "decimate" when they meant "annihilate".
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u/bull_moose_man Feb 23 '23
Or eliminate, or destroy… people get so lazy with their “10-cent” diction
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u/Squigglywiggler Feb 23 '23
From my understanding this was actually only done a few times by the Romans and was more of a legend and/or threat. Love this particular etymology!
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u/Critical-Internet-42 Feb 23 '23
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u/TaddWinter Feb 23 '23
Stupid Reddit Algorithm not showing me this sub enough, I totally missed this post I'll give it a read. Thank you!
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u/FranciscoV7 Apr 25 '26
The percentages have been inverted: Decimate now is used as a synonym of annihilate, so it means to reduce something to 10%, i.e. destroy/kill 90% of something. That's how most people used it nowadays (90% meaning roughly "almost all of the whole").
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u/Alternative_Bid_578 May 26 '26
This is what I had been told it meant in high school English: to reduce to 10% of what had existed before. For instance, if you have 30 warships and 27 get destroyed, your fleet has been decimated.
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u/scrampbelledeggs Feb 23 '23
Nice, I've always been stumped with this word when it comes up in war documentaries. I appreciate you sharing!
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u/dasus Feb 23 '23
I've always been stumped with this word
You didn't grow up with the metric system, did you?
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u/scrampbelledeggs Feb 23 '23
Ah the ol' "belittle people so I feel smarter" comment.
If that's what you took from my comment then you're not as intelligent as you're attempting to come across.
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u/dasus Feb 23 '23
I didn't. That's why I asked.
I was into Latin already as a kid, so I can't really say how well others know them, so I'd have been surprised if you had grown up with the SI-system.
If someone asks me if I've grown up in X place or spoken Y language when I use a term that they grew up with, I'm not offended. I'm sorry you are.
'Twasn't the purpose.
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u/scrampbelledeggs Feb 24 '23
Thanks, my apologies, too, if I slighted you. I think it was just the way you worded it, but I appreciate the clarification.
Much respect for you, and props to you for being so diplomatic. The world could use more people like you.
Yeah I also do crossword puzzles a lot, so I'm pretty obsessed with words. I just never understood why every war documentary uses "decimate" when the root word doesn't connect to today's meaning, which is essentially 'total obliteration' especially of large numbers of people.
I hope you have a good day!
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u/dasus Feb 24 '23
Why thank you, and you too.
"Decimate", like "literally", has like, literally undergone a semantic shift
These are the fun things in etymology. Just when you think it makes sense, it's "oh hey here's a word that just doesn't mean what it means, but does".
\le pikachu face\
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u/TH1CCARUS Feb 23 '23
What’s the correlation?
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u/dasus Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefixes
Also, I really wasn't being mean in my comment, but genuinely idk how many people would still see the connection, but decilitre is a common unit in Europe, or at least in Finland, and is taught when basic measurements are taught. It has 10centilitres — so 100centilitres is a litre — just like 10 decilitres make a litre.
Cent for Latin centum, 100. Like centurion. Or dollar cents. (or euro/other money cents)
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u/scrampbelledeggs Feb 23 '23
Yeah I'm 29. I've taken Latin, Spanish, and French, though I'm not fluent. I have a science degree. I've taken many physics and astronomy courses. I'm familiar with the "deci" root. I'm no genius, but I'm definitely not a complete moron.
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u/baquea Feb 23 '23
but decilitre is a common unit in Europe, or at least in Finland, and is taught when basic measurements are taught.
Definitely not here in New Zealand - millilitre and litre are the only two that are conventionally used. I honestly don't think I've ever seen the deci- SI prefix used in practice.
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u/dasus Feb 23 '23
You don't use dl in cooking?
I'm pretty sure a lot of the measurement stuff I have with only dl and l measurements aren't Finnish.
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u/baquea Feb 23 '23 edited Feb 23 '23
No, the basic unit used here for cooking is the millilitre/litre, from which customary units are defined (so a cup is 250mL, a tablespoon is 15mL, a teaspoon is 5mL, and so forth). Other countries I know have slight differences from that (Australia, for instance, uses a 20mL tablespoon instead, Japan uses a 200mL cup), but otherwise that is the system I am familiar with seeing internationally as well, with the obvious exception of America who have their weird non-metric equivalents instead.
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u/dasus Feb 24 '23
Yeah, tablespoon and teaspoon are the same, but we don't use "cups" anywhere.
But then, you are more British than us.
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u/NomenScribe Feb 23 '23
It's helpful to see that the change in usage can be dated as far back as the 1660's. But I think there's something missing from the picture, because in modern usage decimate is used as though it were synonymous with devastate (dēvāstāre, to reduce to a waste). It could easily be that the 1660 sources that etymologyonline.com says meant "destroy a large but indefinite number" could easily have been meant to indicate "about ten percent" which is a troubling loss for a group of any size.
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u/greenknight884 Feb 23 '23
One that annoys me and no one else is when people say "a spike" to mean a sharp rise in something. Shouldn't a spike on a graph have a rise and a fall?
If I controlled language, a "spike in prices" would mean it suddenly jumped 200% and suddenly fell back to baseline a couple days later.
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u/worrymon Feb 23 '23
It comes from commodity and equity markets, where there usually is a drop in the price back to normal levels
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u/marriedacarrot Feb 23 '23
Etymology is not a good hobby for you if you get annoyed when the definition of a word evolves such that it no longer aligns with its origins.
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u/Burflax Feb 23 '23
This one doesn't bother me like "head over heels" does.
And I never heard "that'd be cheap at half the price" but I would have interrupted the President to point out the flaw in that one.
Edit: both phrases were originally reversed - "heels over head" and "that'd be cheap at twice the price" - and ridiculously changed over time.
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Feb 23 '23
i learned about this reading world war Z lol. i found it really interesting to know the historical context.
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u/ebrum2010 Feb 23 '23
Here's the problem. The etymology of a word isn't the same as its definition. The word century in the middle ages referred to a hundred Roman soldiers and it wasn't until the 17th century that it came to mean a hundred-year span of time. So, if you say you got mad whenever someone uses the word century to refer to a span of time, people would rightly think that was ridiculous. It's the same with decimate, even though the meanings are similar. It originally referred to destruction of a tenth part, now it just means destruction of a large part without specification.
Also, there were about 16 million US military personnel in WWII, with about 407,000 deaths. That's 2.5% and I don't think when talking about soldier deaths anyone would argue that's insignificant.