Very droll. I think if we were speaking Italian (or similar) and using the word 'decimātus' or 'decimatio' then that could be more convincingly argued. In the

Very droll. I think if we were speaking Italian (or similar) and using the word 'decimātus' or 'decimatio' then that could be more convincingly argued. In the case of English assimilating, as it does so often and so eagerly, words from other languages, decimate was probably first used in English only a half millennia ago - so it was adopting the generic 1/10th, rather than the murder your friends, context. I note dictionary.org has a nod to the etymology. From https://www.dictionary.com/browse/decimated https://www.dictionary.com/browse/decimated : "The earliest English sense of decimate is “to select by lot and execute every tenth soldier of (a unit).” The extended sense “destroy a great number or proportion of” developed in the 19th century: Cholera decimated the urban population. Because the etymological sense of one-tenth remains to some extent, decimate is not ordinarily used with exact fractions or percentages: Drought has destroyed (not decimated) nearly 80 percent of the cattle."