Yes but…
“Decimation” in the original Latin had nothing to do with destruction: it originally meant “to tithe: to give (remove) one tenth of.” Then later it came to mean “to kill (remove) every tenth man*.” Both of these senses were originally in use in English by 1600 or thereabouts, but over time it came to mean almost exclusively “to destroy or remove the larger part of,” and this didn’t take long: it had expanded to that meaning by the 1660s. Like it or not, that’s the most usual – in fact, almost invariable — meaning of the word today, so to say Weisberger used it “correctly” is untrue if you go back to the word’s origins or if you use the commonest meaning. He certainly used it in one historically correct sense, and I applaud that: but it isn’t the one true meaning.
- And it was worse than you think: the cohort of usually 480 men was divided into groups of ten, each drew lots, and the loser in each group was killed by the other nine, generally by being beaten to death.
