Next time you go to log on somewhere and can’t remember your password, consider this:  In the Roman army of 2000 years ago if you forgot your password it was lights out for you.

The Roman army didn’t pussyfoot around they killed you.

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They dealt similarly with mutinous behavior in the ranks.

In such a case everyone in the legion was brought out to the parade grounds—that’s 3000 or 6000 men—and the first guy picked a number from one to ten.  Let’s say it was three.  The third guy in line would shout “one”, the fourth “two” etc, until the guy who shouted decem.

That’s Latin for “ten.”

The guy who shouted decim would be killed and the next guy would start again from “one.”

With 300 or 600 dead lying on the field, everyone else tended to behave.

This is the source of our word decimate.

Picky people will point out that the former residents of a town that has been swept away in a landslide—killing everyone in town—weren’t decimated, since it wasn’t one in ten who died.

But they’re being too picky.

Modern dictionaries attempt to describe how people actually speak rather than lay down rules for how they should speak.

The New Oxford American Dictionary is a prime example.  They note both a meanings of “substantial damage” or “significant killing” as well as the more ancient one-in-ten definition. They explain that it has become acceptable to use the word in the broader context.

Both they and the American Heritage Book of English Usage say though, that decimate is more properly used when talking about people than property.

I did a search on the New York Times and came up with 1700 instances of decimate.  I certainly didn’t read them all but of the 30 or so I did scan not one of them was talking about a ten percent loss.

And contrary to Oxford and American Heritage it seemed to me that at least as many of the New York Times citations were talking about things as were referring to people.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that decimate arrived in English around the time of Shakespeare and the first citation explains how a group of Irish were condemned to die by court martial, but that the sentence was mitigated at the Lord Lieutenants mercy, so that they were chosen by lot and only decimated.