(Untitled)

[annikohl]

from the AP: BRICK, N.J. - Into his 90s, decimated by the loss of his beloved wife, and alone at night with the memories of a rough and sad childhood spent battling an alcoholic father and vicious anti-Semitism, Harry Bernstein decided to write.

my question: short of amputation, can a person really be decimated?

Comments

[_paradoxboy_]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who realizes how often that word is misused.

For the audience: Decimate: to remove a tenth (originally, one out of ten of a cohort of Roman soldiers, in punishment for mutiny). Nearly without fail, a modern writer actually means "devastated".

[radiantsheep]

yeah, but just because it started out meaning that doesn't mean it means that now. perhaps this is just the site of language change. besides, i think that what most people eperience as the meaning of a word is more real than what the dictionary says is the meaning of a word. eventually, dictionaries will come to agree too- just takes a couple hundred years!

[_paradoxboy_]

Oh, I know all about linguistic drift. However, as I am a degree-holding pedant, I choose to ignore it when convenient. :)

[radiantsheep]

seriously? that was your first thought after reading that sentence? because mine was: how unexpectedly poignant for a news article.

i don't think using a word for a reason other than its precise dictionary definition is necessarily misuse. we'd cut out the opportunity for lot of lovely metaphor and less than literal figures of speech. metaphorically, a person can be emotionally, spiritually, personally decimated.

[annikohl]

From the American Heritage Dictionary
USAGE NOTE: Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a group. Sixty-six percent of the Usage Panel accepts this extension in the sentence The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war, even though it is common knowledge that the number of Jews killed was much greater than a tenth of the original population. However, when the meaning is further extended to include large-scale destruction other than killing, as in The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, only 26 percent of the Panel accepts the usage.

Shoot, I'm willing to admit all of those definitions, because they pertain to populations. It's the single dude getting decimated that throws me.

[annikohl]

rachel, i think you and i are always going to disagree on cases like this (and that neither of us will ever be surprised by each other's stances!) ...
i'm not exactly a purist with regard to this word ... but i do think that whether one's talking about 1/10, or humans, or animals, the word refers to population and is pretty ridiculous in the context of a single individual.
plus, while word meanings DO change, it IS possible to distinguish in this case; i would say that the broad english-speaking community uses this word to mean the loss of part of a population. and it looks to me as though the writer has confused 'decimated' and 'devestated'. just because a few people make the mistake does not mean that it's a legitimate usage yet. (like you said, give it a few hundred years, but for the moment, it looks a lot like a misuse to me.)