Language is always changing. At one point ‘an apron’ was ‘a napron’ while words like ‘literally’ are no longer literally literal. What are some language battles that have been lost in living memory and what are some others you predict will soon occur?
Edit: Non-english examples very welcome!
“Decimating” no longer means killing ten percent as the Romans did; now it is used to mean the killing of a majority, so it’s close to the opposite of its original meaning.
I thought decimating meant reducing to a tenth, as in removing 90%?
No. It meant killing every tenth soldier in a line
The meaning is derived from the brutality of the act, not the proportion of people killed.
You’re being downvoted, but I suspect you’re actually correct. A note about the act of decimation: it wasn’t just killing every tenth soldier. It was that the other nine soldiers were forced to kill the tenth. It was an absolutely brutal act where soldiers were forced to kill their friends and comrades.
It makes sense that saying an act is as brutal as decimation would then come to replace the word itself over time. That happens pretty frequently in language evolution.
People really love to feel smug about others using words “wrong” for some reason. Let them. I don’t care.
The “deci” prefix is just a coincidence then?
More like a vague gesture, which, in idiom chock-full of metonymy, is legitimate.