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Comment by readthenotes1 | Hacker News Reader

"one that would see his army decimated by cold, hunger and disease."

2 things: A)decimated means 1 in 10, not 9 in 10. B) according to the wiki article, Napoleon had already lost 75% of his initial fighting force by the time he got to Moscow, before the withdrawal.

I am not sure an article on biology should include much history--I would certainly hope it did a better job on the biology...

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From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decimate

Decimate is a word that often raises hackles, at least those belonging to a small but committed group of logophiles who feel that it is commonly misused. The issue that they have with the decline and fall of the word decimate is that once upon a time in ancient Rome it had a very singular meaning: “to select by lot and kill every tenth man of a military unit.” However, many words in English descended from Latin have changed and/or expanded their meanings in their travels. For example, we no longer think of sinister as meaning “on the left side,” and delicious can describe things both tasty and delightful. Was the “to kill every tenth man” meaning the original use of decimate in English? Yes, but not by much. It took only a few decades for decimate to acquire its broader, familiar meaning of “to severely damage or destroy,” which has been employed steadily since the 17th century.

The more language is allowed to drift, the harder it becomes to read old language. I think this is a particularly silly case, but in general, the complaint that people are misusing words shouldn't be met with "It's impossible to misuse words", which this argument implicitly is.

Which language, Latin or English? Who says that in English it needs to have the same meaning as in Latin?

Heck, I've reminded about false friends. For example library ("librărie") in Romanian is the place where you buy books, not rent them.

My particular thing is to avoid Latin plurals in English, but I'm never sure how far to take it. Definitely forums, but axises is possibly annoying.

No one allows or disallows language to drift, there are no language enforcers. This argument is not “it’s impossible” but rather it’s pedantic to claim a word is misused, when it’s been used this way for hundreds of years and so the original definition is no longer applicable.

We are all language enforcers, forcing it to drift in some ways and stopping it from drifting in others.

I suppose that is true and kind of a fun perspective!

Someone could of course institute language enforcers for English, but I'm very skeptical about both the enforcement mechanisms, and the usefulness of even a successful enforcement.

>there are no language enforcers

Bodies like the Académie Française do try to promote language standards ('enforce' is probably not the right word). But I'm not sure how successful they are.

Look in any dictionary and you'll find that that decimate means to devastate aswell.

Language is what people speak not what people proscribe in books or the internet.

If frequency of use is an argument, one could argue that to decimate might not even be a word.

Correct. To decimate is the infinitive form of the verb decimate.

Prescribe, and it's both of these things.

Exactly. If it is used a certain way by enough people, that is also an accepted definition. Dictionaries lag actual speech and language I suppose.

> If it is used a certain way by enough people, that is also an accepted definition.

This mentality seems to be prevalent in the USA, in Germany, on the opposite, many people see this topic differently - just because a lot of people use a certain word/term wrong does not make it right.

And it annoys me endlessly. People can't let go of the genitive, even if it's dead in loads of dialects.

If people knew how many words were just "made up" in the last couple centuries to match the vocabulary of Latin or French... they'd lose their mind

You are figuratively killing me with your literalism.

These days some would've written, "you are literally killing me . . ." (which I find deplorable).

And someone would have replied "I could care less" (incorrectly implying they do care, even if it's a little bit) :(

I don't mind that one because it does not risk destroying the usefulness of a previously useful unambiguous word.

Using "literally" figuratively or, more precisely, as a hyperbolic intensifier [0], is a tradition employed by notable English writers who lived and died long before you were born.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literally

Literally, anytime someone uses the term decimate, I assume they don't actually know what it means unless they explicitly state that they do.

Yes, that phrase stuck out to me also.

Apologists for language attrition will assert that converging language into a handful of very simple words is doubleplusgood, and we should embrace the dumbification because that's 'just how languages work'.

But for a historical article, I did expect a slightly more nuanced take.

Why is this new word “dumbification” and not “smartification”?

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