Die out
Another phrasal verb for you today—to die out. A while back, we talked about “die down.” Today, it’s “die out.” When something dies out, it become less and less prevalent, less and less common, and eventually disappears. That’s the key to “die down,” it’s lower and lower, less and less, and then nothing at all. If something dies out, it’s gone in the end.
Right now, an infected person passes the coronavirus to more than one other person—that guarantees that the virus will continue to spread, especially since so few people have immunity. But if two people on average only spread it to one additional person, then the virus will naturally die out. Fewer and fewer people will get it in the future; and then it will die out and disappear completely.
What are some things that can die out? A tradition can die out, if people stop practicing it. A language can die out—if it’s a rare language and younger people don’t learn it anymore, a language can die out. A species can die out, if it loses its habitat or if it’s hunted or if there are too many predators. A species can die out, meaning that it goes extinct. An individual person cannot “die out,” but population can die out. A tribe can die out. A culture can die out. A fire can die out. You might have a fire in your fireplace. You stop putting new logs on the fire early in the evening, and then by ten or eleven that night, the fire dies out.
I did a search for “die out” and found mostly coronavirus-related examples. But here are a few other examples. Fast fashion is falling out of favor. Fast fashion is the trend toward making very cheap clothing quickly to catch fleeting trends. The quality is low and the garments are often discarded after a season or two because it just doesn’t last. People liked it for the low prices. But I read that many consumers are starting to turn away from fast fashion. They recognize that it has a high environmental impact and that it’s not really cheap if you have to keep buying new clothes. Instead, they are buying more secondhand clothes and donating clothes that they’re not using anymore. Some people think the trend of fast fashion may be about to die out.
Here’s a funny example. A mainframe computer system is a big, bulky system of computers used to run big business applications. Today, much of that is done in the cloud. But in the days before the internet, big corporations would run their businesses on mainframes. These would have all their accounting data, sales data, inventory information, supplier information—all the data a big corporation would generate and process would be done on a mainframe computer.
Some big companies still rely on mainframes. It has just been too expensive and arduous to transition to the cloud. They will eventually, but those mainframes are still hanging on in some big companies. Eventually, though, the mainframes will die out. One day—we may never know what day exactly, but one day—the last mainframe computer will be shut off and that era of computing will have officially died out. We’re not there yet, but that day is coming. In the meantime, the workers who know how to program and maintain those systems are dying out. I don’t mean that the workers are literally dying on the job: they’re retiring. And nobody graduates from Stanford or MIT or Caltech and decides to go into mainframe computing. So the skill set is dying out; as older workers retire, no younger workers have these skills—or have the desire to develop them.
JR’s song of the week
The song of the week is “Only You” by Yazoo. JR selected this song because it appears in the first episode of the new mini-series called “Normal People.” I have read the book by Sally Rooney; it’s a great book and I was so excited to see it was made into a mini-series. I told JR about it and the very same night I told him, he had watched the first episode and he loved it. So now I’m looking forward to trying it out. That’s on Hulu here in the US, but look for it where you are. “Normal People” is the name of the show. And the song that appears is a vintage 80s pop song, “Only You” by Yazoo.
See you next time!
That is all for today. If you’re in Austria, as I know a number of you are, or Georgia—some of you are there, too—then be careful out there. The world is watching! Let’s hope this is the beginning of the end. It has been a wild few months, that’s for sure.
And we will be back here as always on Monday. We are getting closer and closer to the launch of our new web site, and if you want more information on how that’s going to work, head to PlainEnglish.com/new and we’ll make sure you get the inside track on all the exciting changes coming your way. PlainEnglish.com/new. See you next time!
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