Whipped Cream Difficulties

I was considering using that title for the previous post, but I figured in the end (ha!) I’d probably only have one chance to use the GoT reference. And I can use it here, too, because this is one of my peeves that I am petting.

It is estimated that over 90% of the ocean’s whale populations were decimated through the practice of commercial whaling, which was a major engine of the American economy in the 19th century, as captured in books like “Moby Dick,” the 1851 masterpiece by New York native Herman Melville.

The word “decimate” means “reduce by ten percent”, or “to select by lot and kill every tenth man of a military unit.” Now, personally, I am willing to cut folks a little bit of slack: if one our of every nine, or one out of every eleven, is killed, I’m okay with referring to that as “decimation” or “decimating”. As long as it is close to ten percent, I’m okay.

But the phrase “over 90% of the ocean’s whale populations were decimated” is just ridiculous. It has no meaning. It is nonsense.

Does the NYPost even have editors any more? I think the answer to that is “no”.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2026 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Mammals, Wordplay. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.