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VA Tech Experiment: Polar Vortex May Decimate D.C. Stinkbugs In 2014
barlevg writes "Each fall, a team led by Virginia Tech Professor of Entomology Thomas Kuhar gathers brown marmorated stink bugs from around campus and plops them into ventilated and insulated five-gallon buckets designed to simulate the habitats in which the bugs naturally wait out the winter. While previous lab tests have shown the insects capable of surviving chills of -20 C, last month's polar vortex proved too much for the little guys, with only 5% surviving the sustained cold conditions. This suggests that the DC area's population of stink bugs and other overwintering insects should be much lower come spring than in previous years."
They destroy fruit crops and try to survive through the winter by invading houses. I think I've found one flying around my house just about every week this winter. I read about a house around here that they estimated had 25, 000 of them in it.
They have no natural predators in the US. The only thing I've seen eat them is my dog. Which would be funny, except he's a 95 pound Doberman and scratches the hell out of my hardwood floors jumping and chasing after them.
Nope. One in ten in the Roman army were killed. That's decimation. People misuse it all the time.
No. It is you who are clinging to a deprecated definition. Language evolves over time, and the etymology of a word may be such that the definition of a word is based on a historical definition but no longer means the exact same thing.
In the Oxford English dictionary, the 1st definition is "1. kill, destroy, or remove a large proportion of," while the 2nd definition notes that it is historical, "2. historical kill one in every ten of (a group of people, originally a mutinous Roman legion) as a punishment for the whole group."
In Roman times, "addicts" were broke people given as slaved to the people they owed money too. "Nervous" meant a person who was sinewy and vigorous. "Nice" meant ignorant. So you see, just because a word is based on a word that meant something thousands of years ago it doesn't mean it means the same thing today.
Also, when a word has multiple definitions, we have this thing most of us learned about in elementary school called "context." When you read the headline, did you understand which definition it meant? If for some reason you honestly thought it meant 1 out of 10 stinkbugs died, did you understand it after reading the article? Are you being obstinate or nice?
[disclaimer: I'm not the OP you responded to.]
While I agree with what you said, I think it's important to note that the guy you responded to might have been advocating the S.I. units of slaughter:
micromate = kill 1/1000000
millimate = kill 1/1000
centimate = kill 1/100
decimate = kill 1/10
dekamate = overkill by 10x
hectomate = overkill by 100x
kilomate = overkill by 1000x
megamate = overkill by 1000000x
oh, and don't forget the binary versions:
kibimate = overkill by 1024x :^D
mebimate = overkill by 1048576x
gibimate = overkill by 1073741824x (aka instagib)
p.s. I hope they at least dekamated those stink fuckers.