debato

Not de plus bato - except that it very nearly is. This is the best false seam in the band, because both halves are live Esperanto words. De is the preposition, rank 26, from or of. Bato is a blow, off bati, to strike. Read debato as a compound and you get "a from-beating", which is meaningless, and the correct answer is that debat- is one borrowed root and there is nothing to take apart.

And then you look at the Latin. Debattere is de- plus battuere: to beat down, to thrash out. The very seam the Esperanto learner is warned off is the seam the word actually has, one language back. Esperanto took the whole thing from French as a lump, so within Esperanto the parse is wrong; within Latin it is right, and the two roots that make it up are, by an accident nobody arranged, the same two roots the false parse offers. Bato comes from the same battuere that is sitting inside debato, so the "bato" you thought you saw is genuinely in there - it just arrived fused rather than assembled.

This is the inspiri class: a word whose real etymology is more interesting than the folk parse and happens to vindicate it. Enjoy it, and then keep the rule. The test for an Esperanto compound is whether the pieces are Esperanto roots doing Esperanto work in this word, not whether they can be found somewhere in its ancestry.

Using it. The verb is debati, which is transitive - debati la aferon, to debate the matter - and the intransitive alternative is diskuti pri. A debating society is debatklubo, a point at issue is la debatata punkto with the passive participle, and the everyday word for an argument between two people is disputo, not debato: a debato is public and structured. Argumento is what you bring to one.