Passed on, passed away, passed, gone to his reward - I hear these euphemisms all the time. But I hardly ever hear someone say “He died.” or “She’s dead.”
Are the “d” words considered to be too harsh or something? Do you feel uncomfortable using them? Does it unnerve you to hear them? I’m truly perplexed by the reluctance of some people to use them.
There are a lot of different circumstances and reasons someone might choose to use a euphemism instead of more direct wording.
But yeah, some people are uncomfortable with the fact of death, the notion of their own mortality.
I’ve been going to funerals since I was 4 years old. It was weird for me, as a 16 year old teen, when a bunch of my friends came to my brother’s funeral and it was their first ever.
I don’t use “passed on” or “gone to a reward” type language much when speaking about death and being dead, unless it’s for affect.
Seriously, I don’t understand it. My stepmother died of COVID in April 2020, which is a sentence full of information that meant that it wasn’t a great idea for my 80-year-old asthmatic father to go on a cruise in October 2020. And yet when I said that to my sister, she went on a rant about how insensitive it was for me to say those things. To me, it was simple factual information.
A church I’d went to calls the service a Homegoing.
Believe goes into this, and the concept of death as an end is part of a believe some people don’t share and thus chose words that reflect what they believe, passing or I even heard transitioning (though transitioning has taken on alternate meanings today).
For my own belief death is a choice that one could make at the end of their life, but usually not the only one and thus it is possible not to die, but transition before the moment of death and not experience it.
So while I’m not afraid to say the word die, or even my own mortality, I just don’t take it as an accurate word, and in some ways going into death (i.e. saying someone died) sort of equates that one chose to go to hell and is there now, which is something we don’t know.
Wait … You’re saying that Death = Hell?
Death is the absence of life. Whether or not one then goes to an afterlife - a very different kind of life - is debatable and very much dependent on individual belief systems. There is no possible way to have cold hard facts on an afterlife. But when the body and brain cease function (as we can currently measure it) this current life extinguishes and death occurs.
And to the original question; it’s puzzled me too. I’ve never been one for Passed, Passed on, Passed away. Died and dead says it all, IMO.
English has an awful lot of these. We say “senior citizen” instead of “old.” “Collateral damage” instead of “dead civilians.” “Put to sleep” instead of “killed by the vet.” “Let go” instead of “fired.”
We love our euphemisms and use them for all sorts of stuff, but I think there’s a general trend to create them for unpleasant things.
So this doesn’t really say anything about our attitude towards death specifically - just our attitude towards speaking plainly about bad stuff.
Oh, thanks for reminding me. I saw this term for the first time either last week or the week before at an elderly facility, in the context of a “homegoing service.” I just looked at it curiously and wondered how long that term has been used and in what communities. It’s a nice, colorful term, though I’d not use it because I’m a bit more dry and direct. This was in a Black area, so I’m guessing maybe that may be a connection?
My sense, growing up, is that “died” and “dead” are too direct for most people. It’s more words I would hear used to describe animals than people growing up. The notion above that it may also refer to people’s personal religious/spiritual beliefs is not one I had thought of before, but would make sense. (Though we do hear “Christ died for our sins” not “Christ passed away for our sins.”) Overall, I just think it’s euphemistic blunting of a term many people find too harsh to apply to their loved ones, just how suffering from a long disease is referred to as a “courageous battle” with that illness, or some such. I was shocked the other day when I read a friend’s partner’s obituary refer to that person “as [having] died by his own hand.” It both hits the words “die” and mentions suicide explicitly as the means of death. (It was a heartfelt obit written by my friend.) Most of us like death to be sanitized. I think that’s the most of it.
Death being part of life, I call it what it is. Except for here at Walking Dead Manor, where I like to say “He moved to the 16th floor” (there are only fifteen floors).
People are also afraid to say diseases:
People from the old country think it’s bad luck to say a disease out loud. Like if God hears it he’ll give it to you.
Perhaps for some, it’s the same logic for “died” and “dead.”
Is it just English?
That word is so far removed from the concept of death that if I had heard/read the word before reading your post, I would not have understood it as a reference to death.
I like the Mark Twain bluntness and maybe flippant talk about death or John Goodman and Jeff Bridges’ holding their friend’s ashes in a coffee can. I’ve told my family they can handle my ashes like that and say 'he died ‘cause he never went to a doctor. Take a lesson kids!’
Presumably not, but I’m not remotely qualified to speak to their frequency in any other languages.
“Going home” is a fairly common euphemism for dying, among those who believe that those who die go to a heavenly home.
https://www.americanmusicpreservation.com/GoinHome.htm
For those of an Xian bent, the body eventually dies. But the only part that matters, the soul, lives on. So for people of that belief system, saying “Jane died” is factually wrong (within their version of “facts”) since it implies her soul died. Which in that belief system simply isn’t possible.
Hence all the euphemism that do not speak of an end, but rather of a change. Sorta like when a caterpillar converts into a butterfly we don’t say the caterpillar “died”.
It’s all nonsense in my book, but it’s popular nonsense.
I use “dead” or “died” when I’m talking about a personal loss. If I’m talking to a stranger or an acquaintance about their personal loss then I usually use “passed” unless I’ve already heard them use “dead” or “died”.
The first, and only, thing that comes to my mind when someone says “homegoing” is a funeral or memorial service. I’ve heard “homegoing” used to refer to funeral services my entire life. I was taught that it was originally about the spirit (soul, essence, etc) of slaves returning to Africa after being “freed” by death. This works well with Christianity so it’s still a popular way to refer to funerals in the Black Christian community.
I’m not entirely sure it belongs on this list because it has never felt like a way to sugarcoat death (as opposed to passed, with the father, transcended this plane, etc). I consider funeral-memorial-homegoing to be mostly synonymous. Broadly speaking I would expect a funeral to be religious, a memorial to probably be secular, and a homegoing to be Black.
It was pointed out to me a long time ago that the more uncomfortable a concept is, the more euphemisms we come up with for it. Hence why there are endless slang terms for things like toilets, sex, death and the like, and little if any for non-discomfiting notions like a can opener or a shinbone. Regional dialects excepted, but nobody’s calling a faucet a spigot becuase the former squicks them out.
Exactly. In fact, “euphemism” quite literally means something like “auspicious speaking.”
In some Christian faiths, a funeral denotes a religious service with a casket present, while a memorial service is just as religious but no casket.
In modern usage, I find that secular memorials tend to be called “celebrations of life”. Which to me is kind of gaggy but I try not to judge (usually fail though).
The word ‘passed’ instead of died has a religious connotation, like homegoing, meaning the person has passed from being on earth to a different plane of existence. So it has become a euphemism but with also has a specific meaning.
I think using a different word for something uncomfortable or dangerous is probably ubiquitous. For example many cultures have a use-word for the animal we call the bear, which isn’t the ‘real’ name, but means ‘the brown one’ or something like. Because naming something brings it closer.