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Whats your hot take on something that doesnt matter at all?
(piefed.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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Decimate means 1/10th destroyed, lost, whatever. I don't care that the dictionary says that meaning is obsolete. I get that the meaning of words changes over time, but it has the prefix deci. 1/10th. You don't get to decide something that starts with 1/10th means near total even if it's a scary sounding word.
This is my anthill and I'm dying here.
I read a Matt Helm spy thriller where the hero knows that his boss has been replaced by a double because the real guy would never use 'decimate' to mean 'eradicate.'
Penultimate must send you into spasms as well
I didn't even know it had an alternate or wrong meaning
Meanwhile I hear it used correctly maybe 5% of the time
Seems like we all have different experiences with this word
I'm going to guess, based on the pattern of other misuses, they use it like "ultimate", but with emphasis?
Do we have any other words where adding the prefix "pen" to it means "next to"?
Pen is more like "almost", like in peninsula, almost an island.
Penis
๐
I have so many like that one. At some point in English one billion dropped its value three orders of magnitude and it is spreading to other languages. What now is called a billion it was one thousand million or a milliard.
More recently, one dude used the word hallucination for what AI do and everyone ran with it, there was already a word to describe that phenomenon, fabulation. Hallucination means something completely different.
Yeah, but the AI bros don't want to imply that the LLMs are lying to you.
So we get to hundred, then thousand up to hundred thousand, why would we use a thousand thousand for a million, or ten hundred thousand, or a hundred thousand thousand? A new word at each separator just makes easy parsing.
One hundred seventy three thousand million four hundred sixty two thousand four hundred twenty just sounds so much worse and harder to parser when hearing it.