Linguistics just doesn’t deal with definitions like that. It does mean that, and certainly even connotatively historically. Today, in modern parlance, it definitely means “to kill a large portion of” something, and is almost never used as a 10% reference. So your team could be correctly described as “decimated” in both scenarios.
Linguistics are descriptive, not prescriptive. There can be no “common misconception” in language, because the moment a misconception is common enough, it becomes true
Linguistic drift requires a considerable majority understanding, not just a large minority
By way of example, no matter how many men think “chartreuse” is a vaguely pink color or that “trans-man” includes Caitlyn Jenner, it’ll still be lime-green and Eliot Page.
Decimation means “lose 10%”, not “lose all BUT 10℅”
If two people suddenly quit your twenty-man team you’ve been decimated. If eight or eighteen people quit you’ve been devastated.
(Plus a bunch of “politics” and civil rights things.)
Linguistics just doesn’t deal with definitions like that. It does mean that, and certainly even connotatively historically. Today, in modern parlance, it definitely means “to kill a large portion of” something, and is almost never used as a 10% reference. So your team could be correctly described as “decimated” in both scenarios.
Dictionaries are free to note whatever definition they want, but so is everyone else
Language - wait for it - evolves.
I’ve always just interpreted the deca latin base as meaning exponential.
Great answer
Linguistics are descriptive, not prescriptive. There can be no “common misconception” in language, because the moment a misconception is common enough, it becomes true
Linguistic drift requires a considerable majority understanding, not just a large minority
By way of example, no matter how many men think “chartreuse” is a vaguely pink color or that “trans-man” includes Caitlyn Jenner, it’ll still be lime-green and Eliot Page.
Worked in a company that decimated their workforce with redundancies. I word it correctly and other people wrongly assume it means something else.