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"Decimate" =/= "devastate", but common misuse becomes common use, so here we are. 🤦♂️
Language is fun like that. Kinda like how ‘literally’ can, and often does, mean ‘figuratively’, which has the opposite meaning.
It annoys me that people keep saying "figuratively" is what they mean instead of "literally". "Figuratively" may be the opposite, and technically correct, but the use of the word "literally" in this way is to strengthen a statement. A more appropriate correction would be "actually" or "seriously", which holds the intended meaning. "Figuratively" is the last thing it should be replaced with.
The meaning of a word doesn't change just because you use it incorrectly.
It does if lots of people use it incorrectly
That is literally how language works. Words only mean what we mean when we say them.
So if I potato, you can ottoman?
If enough people agree, yes.
They don't.
That's actually the point. Nobody agrees that potato=ottoman but if enough people agree on a meaning it starts to become the meaning or at least a partial meaning. Maybe the point is moot with you but I get the feeling you wouldn't understand the joke.
I love when people try to argue against the point you're making. And by sheer coincidence, the "correct" definition of words just happens to be whatever the definition was when they were growing up.
I wish just once that one of the "words shouldn't change" people doubled down and refused to speak anything but early modern English from 500 years ago.
Language morphology, but you're close. Except for that last sentence, technically. That's some bullshit, right there. 🤣
Yep decimate is so commonly misused that our lovely descriptivist dictionaries are now incorporating the incorrect use as correct. It’s too bad, too, because the word had a very specific meaning which is now lost. The language is less useful for changes like this.