This is really bothering me, what’s the difference between terminating and exterminating something. The people I asked suggested that extermination was plural, but I went through english class and the prefix ex- never came up as meaning more than one. Can anyone help me terminate/exterminate this problem?
Terminate means “to bring to an end or halt” while exterminate means “to get rid of by destroying completely; extirpate”. To terminate a program would merely mean to stop running it, while exterminating it implies something a little more forceful, like deleting it from your hard drive and using the CD-ROM it came on for skeet shooting. Terminate is also sometimes used (somewhat euphemistically) to mean something like exterminate in the sense of “terminate (end) someone’s life”, as in the (in)famous phrase “terminate with extreme prejudice”. Etymologically, exterminate comes from the same place as terminate, the Latin terminus “boundary, end” plus the prefix ex-, “outside of”, and means something like “to drive outside of the boundaries”.
I lost my job at Orkin today.
They terminated me.
I exterminated bugs.
Somebody called?
We have special this summer: two beheadings for the price of one!
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