Ah yes, my favorite pet peeve - descriptivism vs prescriptivism in linguistics. Lives have been wasted arguing about this exact interpretation of decimate, my p

Ah yes, my favorite pet peeve - descriptivism vs prescriptivism in linguistics. Lives have been wasted arguing about this exact interpretation of decimate, my position is that 'decimate' in a 2013, Western context means one of the definitions posted above - i.e., significantly reduce in number, not by 10%.