Obiter was taken aback by readers’ reaction to the Gazette’s recent front-page headline, ‘Family law "decimated" by LSC tender’. Quite right, you might think – after all, it is appalling that so many firms should have lost their family legal aid contracts. But that was not the only thing about the story that stirred the profession. The Gazette’s use of the word ‘decimated’ prompted almost as many comments and letters as the impact of the tender itself. Solicitors were quick to point out that ‘decimate’ refers to the Roman punishment of killing ‘one in 10 men’ in a mutinous group. Correspondents claimed it should only be used to indicate a 10% reduction, rather than the 46% described in the story. Suitably abashed, we consulted the Oxford Dictionary of English, which gives the first meaning of the word as, ‘kill, destroy or remove a large proportion of’. On the historical ‘one in 10’ usage, the tome adds that this has been ‘more or less totally superseded by the later, more general sense’. But it pointedly adds: ‘Some traditionalists argue that this and other later senses are incorrect.’ They certainly do.