I recently found a most excellent quote on the Merriam-Webster Dictionary website. Many people object to the use of decimate to mean destroy, pointing out that the word originally meant “to reduce by one-tenth.” But this is incorrect: almost every word we use today has moved away from its root meaning. If you object to decimate, you should also make sure that literal is only used to mean “of, relating to, or expressed in letters,” and that’s literally ridiculous. This points to a phenomenon that comes up frequently in everyday interactions between people called “prescriptivism” though I’m sure that the majority of people employing it have no idea what that…