Mea Culpa: How one word cut a headline about knife crime to pieces

Questions of style and usage in last week’s Independent

‘It’s worse than decimated, centurion... we’ve lost at least 69 per cent of the cohort’ (Downloaded from image.net)

My campaign to abolish the word “decimate” has not yet succeeded. It originally meant “reduce by one tenth” but, because it sounds a bit like “destroy” and “exterminate”, it is widely used to mean “dramatically reduce”.

This is particularly awkward for some readers when we use it of a percentage reduction that is not 10 per cent. We said last week, for instance, “Youth services ‘decimated by 69 per cent’ in less than a decade amid surge in knife crime, figures show”.

Thanks to John Schluter for questioning the use of “decimated”, but pretty much everything about this headline is terrible. The d-word is in quotation marks because it was used by an MP commenting on the figures, although she didn’t mention the 69 per cent.