Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
decimate (v.)
Today, decimate means “to destroy or kill or otherwise wipe out a lot of any group or thing”: Disease and hunger have decimated the population of the Horn of Africa. When we first acquired this word from Latin, its meaning was “to execute one of every ten”; it was the way the Romans punished mutiny in the ranks. Some commentators have insisted on that as the only allowable meaning, but in fact it has long been obsolete, and the extended sense meaning “to take away or destroy a tenth part of anything” is at least archaic and perhaps obsolescent. Even if you use decimate intending it to mean “to destroy one tenth,” your audience will not understand it that way. See ETYMOLOGICAL FALLACY.
