TP2000
Well-Known Member
I can’t believe you went this far trying to belittle them... frankly it reflected worse on you. It is a super common usage. It is used to convey the idea of allowing something to gently wind down or trail out...verse a harsh stop like you keep suggesting they should have said. It is a play on the old concept “to ride off into the sunset...”
I'd never heard the word "sunsetting" used in a sentence before, certainly not as a synonym for the word "ending". And from my online research, the word "ending" would have directly applied in that sentence Mr. Potrock authored instead of his use of the word "sunsetting".
I'm clearly not sitting at the cool end of the table at dinner parties, if that's what kind of vocabulary the in crowd is using.
I was heartened to discover though that it's not a word that exists in several dictionaries I checked, and online searches lead me to forums where people are trying to figure out what it means after someone used it in a sentence, usually that someone worked in HR and uses lots of buzzwords anyway. So it's not just me.
Also, according to several online dictionaries, the phrase "ride off into the sunset" traces its first usage to 1963, after TV westerns had been popular for the previous decade. So that phrase isn't that old.
But I'm going to start using sunsetting in conversation as much as I can, rest assured.