It’s been following me around a lot this week, so I thought I’d give in and declare DECIMATE my word of the week!
DE-CI-MATE, transitive verb: to divide or split object by 10%, to take a tenth of or from, to destroy a proportion of.
Etymology: from the Latin: decimare, to ‘punish every tenth man chosen by lot’, which itself comes from the Latin for ‘ten’. The past participle bears the ‘t’ from which we get the English (like most Latin to English etymological derivations), even though the literal would not be the use that we have.
Alexandrina Brant 