End of Life
This comes to all of us, whether we want it or not.
Increasingly nowadays, one can make a conscious end-of-life decision: note the hyphens you’ll need in order to make the phrase an adjective.
But what one should never do is make the phrase the horrible verb that I saw in an announcement from a tech provider that is discontinuing a line of software tools:
[Nameless tech vendor] is to end of life [products X, Y and Z] in a move that will see those core legacy products not supported after December 2023.
First, if they are ‘core products’, why are they being discontinued?
Second, note the sneaky use of the passive voice as a way to remove human or institutional agency (and thus responsibility), instead of more honestly saying We will no longer be supporting …
And that awful use of end of life as a verb! Not even hyphens can redeem that.
(Thanks to Sandra Geddes for bringing this horror to my attention.)
Start the discussion!