extinction
n.— «But the thing is, as Natasha points out, the language of the slot machine industry belies its ultimate aims. There’s a term bandied about at the trade shows: “extinction.” We need to design for extinction, we need to reduce time-to-extinction, and so on. What’s extinction? That’s the moment that the customer—the gambler sitting at the slot machine—runs out of money. The wallet, or credit card, is now “extinct.” Mission accomplished. (Now, if we could just achieve that a little bit quicker with an improved design…).» —“The flip side of customer experience” by Mark Hurst Good Experience May 1, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
How and why do words from one language find their way into another? Vietnamese, for instance, includes many words borrowed or adapted from French, a vestige of colonialism. For example, the Vietnamese word for “train station,” ga, comes...
What’s a word for the act of being so focused on documenting an important event, such as a wedding or an eclipse, that your effort to capture it distracts from experiencing the event itself? The A Way with Words Facebook group has some...