[interroboink]

This might be terminology that's used differently in different places. For instance, in video games it is extremely common to use "postmortem" to mean "post-shipping."

Example: https://blog.codinghorror.com/game-development-postmortems/ Note the dual emphasis on both "what went right" and "what went wrong," not just one or the other.

[brabel]

But postmortem is literally “post death” in Latin. It’s synonymous with autopsy! I know people misuse borrowed words all the time, but come on?!

[interroboink]

> is literally “post death” in Latin

Yes; I think what I described matches that meaning?

Post-death, as in: "it's over," "activity has halted," "no more work being done."

Death does not necessarily have a bad/negative connotation. It's just the end of something.

This is in contrast to the original comment: "something that went so wrong you had to kill it." Death does not imply something went wrong or that it happened forcefully.

I guess "autopsy" generally is talking about "finding the cause of death" so maybe that has a more negative connotation ("something (bad) happened, causing death, let's find it").

Ah, words with their fuzzy meanings (:

[WD-42]

> Post-death, as in: "it's over," "activity has halted," "no more work being done”

Which makes even less sense as we all know software is never done, unless it truly is dead.

[vitorfblima]

In the context of a game it applies. A game can be "done", as in shipped, no more updates, patches, etc.

[hungryhobbit]

Languages change. That word "literally", which you just used, meant one thing for decades (centuries?) ... and now it also (literally) means the exact opposite.

You can be the crabby old guy complaining about how the youth ruined English ... or you can accept that languages aren't immutable, and that the meaning of postmortem is no longer it's literal meaning.

[bee_rider]

The postmortem for many cows is “how did you like your hamburger” so it isn’t all bad (from the user point of view at least).

[thaumasiotes]

> But postmortem is literally “post death” in Latin.

Sure, that's true. It's not really relevant to people who don't speak Latin.

> It’s synonymous with autopsy!

This isn't true. I have no idea how you got here. In English an autopsy is a surgical procedure performed on a corpse for the purpose of identifying the cause of death. In particular, it's a noun. "Post-mortem" in the etymologically literal "after death" sense is an adverb or adjective identifying whatever it is as taking place chronologically after some contextually-specified death.

But, you seem to put some weight on the etymology of a word independently of its current meaning. In that case autopsy "literally means" to witness something personally, as opposed to hearing about it from someone else. (It's "self-eye" in Greek just as post mortem is "after death" in Latin.) Somehow I doubt that's what you had in mind...?

[brabel]

An autopsy is an exam that is performed postmortem. And that’s really how people are using postmortem as a noun for the analysis that they perform after the “death” of a company, so it is a synonym at least approximately, if you don’t see that I guess you don’t have a very good imagination.

[thaumasiotes]

Try and find me some sentences out there on the internet in which one of the words could be reasonably substituted for the other one.

They don't mean similar things and they aren't used similarly. A postmortem is, as you note in part, a report or a meeting for the purpose of producing or discussing such a report; an autopsy is a surgical procedure. They're as "synonymous" as the words "cigarette" and "cancer".

[brabel]

> They're as "synonymous" as the words "cigarette" and "cancer".

Now you get it.