decimate

So I turned on the TV, and it was on HBO, and there was some kind of children's program on—Crashbox, it was called—and what I saw was some puppet (an old man, or a troll or something) learning about vocabulary from a disembodied narrator-voice; and the disembodied narrator-voice said (this is probably not verbatim): "One last word: decimating, which means to wipe out or destroy completely"—at which point the puppet exploded in its easy chair.  Ha ha!

One problem: that's not what decimating means.  The verb to decimate means, loosely, to wipe out or destroy a large percentage of something; what it means precisely is to kill or to remove one in every ten.  You heard me: one in ten.  To reduce to 90%.  When I first learned that, I was like, "Holy shit," because I, like you, had thought of decimate as being roughly synonymous with annihilate, and 90% is a fuck of a lot more than zero—but then I thought about it this way: if you decimated the population of New York City, that would be 800,000 dead.  And 800,000 dead would mean a pretty big font size on the next day's headlines, pretty goddamned big indeed.  You kill 800,000 New Yorkers, you are not kidding around (which is why, evidently, we've exaggerated the word's sense in our shitty-ass vocabularies*).

So why does this matter?  Although I certainly can get unreasonably worked up about the misuse of a word—and although no dictionary I consulted** even acknowledged the "destroy completely" definition—I don't care all that much if somebody uses decimate wrong: honestly I'm sympathetic enough to the "descriptivist" side that I see how the word's kind of headed in that direction anyway.  So then why am I bothering to write this shit?

Because I want to know what kind of an ostensibly "educational" television show takes the time to "teach" kids a word without bothering to fucking look it up first.  There's something profoundly offensive about this.  It's almost like a kind of Dubya–style incuriosity and I smell something immoral in it—definitely irresponsible, obviously, but I feel pretty good about going ahead and upping it to immoral.  If I'm ever a father, I hope to God I don't become so worn down and ground out by life that I'll give fake answers to questions my kids ask me.  If my son or daughter (or a puppet in an easy chair) asks me, "Why do moths fly around lightbulbs," I'm not going to say, "Because they think it's the moon," unless I'm damned sure that's true—unless I'm damned sure it makes even a lick of sense!  I'm going to say, "I don't know, honey, that's a good question, let's look it up!"  (Yes, I would call a puppet in an easy chair "honey.")  So who are these fucking douchebags at Crashbox who produce a show and put it on TV to teach kids the words they just think they know the definitions of?  Do they think that if they're producing "educational" television, they have less of an obligation to fact-check?  My God that's douchey!

And that's all for today.

*  Yeah, you heard me: shitty-ass.

** Merriam–Webster's Tenth, the OED, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, and Apple's dictionary "widget" (Oxford American Dictionaries, apparently).

[Hey... Crashbox.  Crashbox.  I'm typing it up without italics so Google can find it.  Q.v.]