386
TIL About the Jeju Massacre, where South Korean forces wiped out 10 percent of the island of Jeju for the crime of organizing a General Strike (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/til@lemmy.ca
69 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

If you replace "wiped out" in the title of the OP with decimate then it'd be exactly as wasteful, would use the word as it's understood in modern English properly, and you'd get to use the original meaning too. Sure, it's redundant (sort of) but it doesn't take any extra time or space than what's already written.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Actually, after some further thought I've realised I was wrong actually. If you were to use the phrasing "decimated 10 percent of the population", it wouldn't be redundant it would just be straight up wrong. To decimate 10 percent of a population would mean either you killed 10 percent of 10 percent of the population (i.e. 1 percent), or it would mean you've killed a large proportion of that 10 percent of the population.

    And of course my point about how using the phrase "decimating the population" on its own would lead to confusion for most people because when people think of "a large proportion of", people generally think that it's more than 10 percent.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent