Hellozees, everyone!
That there is a word that I just came up
with, although I struggle to believe that it hadn't already been
invented by some random Californian surfer dude. It just sounds so
friendly and eloquent – like gentle waves barely gracing the shore.
(And I do know that gracing is already done barely.)
Quite the poet, am I not?
Now onto some other things, my friends,
although we will still be somewhat flirting with poetic stuff.
The topic I'm going to talk (write) to
you about today is none other than good ol' DEATH.
No worries, though, I'm going to keep
it light. There's not going to be gore or gibs, blood, massacre or
murder. This blog is going to be about the ways that use to talk
about people dying. Oops, did I say the D-word? I meant passing
on, of course!
As an annoying linguist, I find it
interesting how most people use language only for functional
purposes. What I mean is that we humans rarely pay attention to the
so-called expressive power of our language. For example, we have
numerous synonyms that mean the same as 'good', yet we rarely talk
about how amazing, fantastic or splendid the movie we just saw was.
People just want to get the point across.
Adjectives aside, though, it's a lot
more rare to substitute plain verbs with more extraordinary ones.
Let's face it: we say, we write, we walk, and we talk a lot more
often than we utter, scribe, stroll or conversate.
We don't pay very much attention to our
everyday speaking – unless we are talking about sensitive
topics. That is when things really start hitting the fan.
Picture yourself at a funeral service
talking to a grieving widow whose husband of 30 years just, well,
died about a week ago. You
might not want to go to her and blurt out the D-word – instead
you'd rather stick with, for example, passing on, which kind
of gives you the feeling that the person did not actually die, they
just leveled-up, moved onto a higher realm of existence,
graduated from life or whatever positive thing you can think
of. Anyway, this is where you want to choose your words carefully and
have to realize that synonyms aren't really synonyms at all.
The idea for this blog came from a text
that I read a few days ago on a day when the musician Prince and
former professional wrestler Chyna died. Someone had written
something like “Now Chyna knows
the secret about what happens when you die!” I though that
was ingeniously put.
Until next time!