The BBC radio journalism style guide explains why BBC reporters have such a precise, concise language, utterly devoid of superflous words, completely-nonredundant and with every thingy being relevant to stuff. Also, there's a wonderful dry sense of humour running through it.

Here's one I didn't know about:

Decimate
precise meaning is to kill one in ten, and therefore was not used much. The meaning "to destroy or kill on a large scale" is just about acceptable. But "the boot-making industry has been decimated" is not.