My husband's so white....

... he thinks he's Roman.

So, every single time someone uses the word decimate, my husband has a cow. Unfortunately, it's used a lot in disaster movies, alien invasion movies, and spy movies. Those tend to be the movies he wants me to watch with him. Thus, I hear that word used a lot.

Unfailingly, he always has to tell me how they're using the word all wrong. Originally, "to decimate" was to take 1/10th of something... namely, one-tenth of a mutinous branch of the Roman army. It was used as a form of punishment for an unruly lot. Roman military units that were being punished would be divided into groups of ten. Then they would draw straws. One out of every group of ten would be killed. The word decimation is a Latin derivative meaning to "take one tenth".

Okay, obviously, the word has changed immensely over time. Decimation now means mass scale slaughter or massive destruction. That's how it's widely used today. For some reason or another, though, my husband feels that we should only use the word like the old Romans did, as if Roman Phalanxes are still stomping around the world. So whenever we watch a movie and the planet gets "decimated", I await the inevitable, "Oh, we're okay. Only one-tenth of us died."