DD,
Here's the relevant portion of the OED entry for "decimate."
4. transf. a. To kill, destroy, or remove one in every ten of. b. rhetorically or loosely. To destroy or remove a large proportion of; to subject to severe loss, slaughter, or mortality.
1663 J. SPENCER Prodigies (1665) 385 The..Lord..sometimes decimates a multitude of offenders, and discovers in the personal sufferings of a few what all deserve. 1812 W. TAYLOR in Monthly Rev. LXXIX. 181 An expurgatory index, pointing out the papers which it would be fatiguing to peruse, and thus decimating the contents into legibility. 1848 C. BRONTĖ Let. in Mrs. Gaskell Life 276 Typhus fever decimated the school periodically. 1875 LYELL Princ. Geol. II. III. xlii. 466 The whole animal Creation has been decimated again and again. 1877 FIELD Killarney to Golden Horn 340 This conscription weighs very heavily on the Mussulmen..who are thus decimated from year to year. 1883 L. OLIPHANT Haifa (1887) 76 Cholera..was then decimating the country.
Even as careful a writer as Charles Lyell, the originator of the uniformitarian hypothesis and the first major scientist to support Darwin, uses the word in sense 4b. And, of course, sense 4b begins to appear in print in Early Modern English, so it's got a pretty good pedigree.
If you look at the full entry, the military meaning as applied to the Roman army practice of killing every tenth man in a mutinous unit is the third meaning. The first two, which are obsolete, are "tithing" and "dividing into tenths."
I think you may almost be guilty of the etymological fallacy. But it was only the third meaning, so you're partly exonerated.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of DD Farms
Sent: 2008-01-29 20:36
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Tasmanian Devils
>DD: As further proof of the lack of the study of English word
>meanings consider;
>QUOTE
>Researchers are working toward an understanding of a unique
>transmissible and rapidly spreading cancer that threatens the very
>existence of Tasmanian devils. The disease has decimated the devil
>population by nearly 90 percent in certain geographical areas of
>Tasmania, and officials project that within twenty years the entire
>species could become extinct.
>END QUOTE
I wonder if they mean nine percent. {i.e. Ninety percent of ten
percent.} Nota bene; The authors of that also apparently slept
through Xeno and probably flunked the Calculus. Are proof readers
also a dying breed?
For citation and an interesting story of a dying breed, like unto
grammarians and Latin Teachers(?) see;
>Tasmanian Devils' Existence Threatened By Rapidly Spreading Cancer
>http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080128173735.htm
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