It's usage is still changing, obviously , but for me it's a more difficult transition because of the 'deci'
Wikipedia says it may be ahistorical though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment)
It also notes "In modern English, the word is used most commonly not to mean a destruction of a tenth but rather annihilation."
Sometimes prescriptivism is pretentious nonsense (like hypercorrection), status-seeking bullshit, or bullying masquerading as erudition, but sometimes it's just an explicit contribution to that ongoing negotiation and consensus.
When one of my students submits an essay containing the word 'over-exaggerate,' I correct it, striking out 'over-.' The word appears in dictionaries, so in that sense it's standard, and my correction is wrong, but it is an ugly, stupid word and should never appear in academic writing (and literate college students should know that). In my students' writing, it has increasingly replaced the simpler, better "exaggerate."
It's my responsibility as a teacher to encourage my students to think about the choices they make and the language they use, especially in an academic context, but I'm also hoping to cultivate the habit more broadly of just thinking about their choices, understanding that there are choices, and recognizing that the alternative is to be at the mercy of whatever consensus they're receiving from pop culture.
In most contexts, outside of a classroom, I won't bother with the correction, because it would be obviously unwelcome and inappropriate, but it has its place.
The line between descriptivism and prescriptivism is also very porous. Usage largely determines correctness, so unless you want to throw correctness completely out the window, there are going to be gray areas where either usage isn't widely agreed or where it really is necessary to correct language that falls afoul of standard usage regardless of whether the incorrect use will eventually be deemed correct.
Anyhow, 'disinterest''s disputed sense fills a hole in the language: 'uninterested' is a word; 'uninterest' isn't. People have solved the problem by collapsing the two words into one -- so that 'disinterest' and 'uninterest' are synonyms -- and throwing away the meaning of disinterest they use less often.
If I accept this, English loses some of its complexity and color. I don't want that.
Moreover, key texts and concepts become harder to appreciate if its sense corrupts this way. What do people think "disinterested justice" is if they don't know the meaning of the word? This kind of literacy is, I think, a basic building block of critical thinking. One can't think effectively, particularly in a social (political) setting, if one can't use words effectively.
I'm also not super convinced that people won't be able to understand concepts like "disinterested justice" because there's plenty of other terminology for that like "impartial" that are arguably much more common; I'm honestly not sure I've ever heard the term "disinterested justice" before now. I can at least see the value of that viewpoint being expressed even if I don't agree with it though, so in retrospect I should have responded before directly to the comment about "decimate" rather than replying to your response.
"Ironically, the earliest recorded sense of disinterested is for the disputed sense."
An example would be saying that someone was "disinterested" in what was happening on TV, or in music that was playing.
Amazing that pearl clutching over D&D rule changes has now extended to New Yorker magazine.
[1] http://realmsofauria.blogspot.com/2016/02/d-basic-monsters-d...
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For our ecosystem, a well-managed wolf population is probably a good thing, but rationality is about to go out the window over here. Of course, wolves do not slaughter herds out of pure fun, but also true is that the can wreak quite a bit of economic damage if they break into a holding pen.
A more reliable approach might be to enact policy change where the return of the wolf to the ecosystem offers financial benefits.
One way to do this is with licensed trophy hunting. Nobody argues thousands of dollars in revenue from hunting tag lotteries, trophy fees, etc. is "fake news" as they might with an appeal to ecological reasons.
>>hat will a dire wolf do to livestock if we bring them back?
Is a dire wolf any worse than regular wolf here?
>> Wolves slaughter tons of livestock for fun.
Almost no predator slaughers their prey "for fun". Hunting has a massive cost to it - risk of death, injury and expenditure of energy always have to be balanced with the potential gains. Wolves hunt when they are hungry, not because they are bored.
Do some actual research on wolves. They will kill a dozen cows in a day in a pen and not eat any of it.
To be honest with you - I don't even know where I'd begin to look for stats like these - have you got any links I could read?
I was only really able to ask Gemini about it which seems to confirm that wolves generally don't kill animals for any reason other than sustenance but obviously LLM so I accept it might be fully wrong - https://g.co/gemini/share/e1ce79cd97de
Easy to talk smack until it happens to you or someone you know.
‘Son, you weren’t an accident, you were custom designed to be smarter than Einstein, faster than Bolt, with musical attitude rivaling Mozart.’
Sounds like a dystopian nightmare waiting to happen. Ban it now.