‘Go extinct' or 'Become extinct'

The week before last the pens of the retired admirals of Budleigh Salterton were spluttering their contents onto paper. The Times, in an obituary, had described H.M.S. Hood as a ‘battleship’. As every schoolboy knew, Hood, blown apart in that encounter with Bismarck and Prinz Eugen in the Denmark Strait on 24 May 1941, was not a battleship—she was a battlecruiser.

On a much lesser scale in the same week, there were those of us grating at the receipt of a society newsletter. Apart from the usual corporate managerialist claptrap on ‘strategies’ which divert so much effort from the organisation doing its real job, it contained the phrase: ’to stop wild animals going extinct’.

There have been discussions on ‘becoming extinct’ and ‘going extinct’. As numerous people have pointed out, there is nothing wrong with using the verb ‘go’ with some adjectives. However, ‘extinct’ is an absolute term; there are no shades of extinction, just like ‘complete’, ‘perfect’ or ‘certain’. Something can ‘become complete’, ‘become perfect’, ‘become certain’ or 'become extinct'; nobody, surely would write ‘go complete’, ‘go perfect’, ‘go certain’—or ‘go extinct’.

If I see or hear ‘go extinct’ again I will go mad.

Dodo by Roelant Savery (late 1620s)--before it became extinct