Disease, we hear, will decimate ash trees, as the elms were obliterated, and we will see the spoliation of the landscape. I don’t want to be a schoolma’am about decimate. It has, as R.W. Burchfield pointed out in his edition of Fowler, been used for ‘destroy a large proportion’ for as long as it has meant strictly ‘destroy one in ten’. By chance, Burchfield’s chosen illustration of the disputed meaning was: ‘The forest has largely gone, decimated by a forest industry that is just now assaulting the final remains.’
Ash, by the way, is a suitably ancient word, found in about the year 700 to render the Latin fraxinus. It was spelled aesc then, though the pronunciation was the same, and aesc was the name of a runic letter transliterated as æ. In the same way, ac (‘oak’) was the name of the runic letter for a.
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