I’ve always found it odd that soldiers & cops ‘fall’, even if they could have been sitting on the toilet at the time. The rest of us ‘pass away’ or simply ‘die’.
Another oddity is that for all the rewards and glory said to be in heaven, most Christians sure seem afraid of dying.
Personally I try to avoid all the euphemisms. Or sometimes in a rare moment of tact I’ll skirt words altogether. But dead is dead is dead. Happens to the best of us.
Death is equated to Sheol which is the Hebrew word for the abode of the dead. In the new testament the word Gehenna (Hell) is often used in place of where we would expect Sheol which means a place of burning, torment, misery.
Likewise the apostle’s creed has variations of “He descended to the dead / into death / into hell”
So yes death = hell, however not all that passed away goes into hell, so I usually don’t chose the word dead/death. I do understand that makes the word death/dead have a double meaning, and I’m find with that along with both usages. After all Jesus had this issue too:
John 11:11 After he had said this, he went on to tell them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.”
12 His disciples replied, “Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better.” 13 Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep.
14 So then he told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead,
I generally prefer to say “died”. “Passed away” doesn’t bother me too much, but I loathe “passed”. “Did you hear that Jimmy passed?” Grrr. Passed what? A kidney stone? A football? A red Ferrari on the Pacific Coast Highway?
That’s nothing! Little Johnny once lit a cat’s tail on fire and it passed a motorcycle!!!
Yeah, “passed” is a good thing. It’s the opposite of “failed.”
Well … the decedent did fail at continuing to live.
Spanish has a load of them too. Apart from just plain morir, to die, some of them are
fallecer,
desaparecer,
extinguirse,
desvanecerse,
pasar,
irse,
pasar a mejor vida
“Desaparecer” is literally to disappear. I was 11 when I first heard it in school, used as a euphemism for death in an author biography, and was very confused. I asked the teacher “He disappeared? Where did he go?”
I don’t think it’s got much to do with whether the speaker is afraid of mortality or whatever.
It just comes across as a slightly harsh word and in polite conversation, we try to avoid upsetting people unnecessarily (curiously though, I think “death” is slightly softer than “died”…I guess using the verb puts slightly more focus on the event/illness itself).
It’s not like this is something unique to died and dead…there are lots of ways we soften our language in daily life. I would never call someone “old” for example, even though I often refer to myself that way.
It’s not a hangup about ageing, it’s just not wanting to be even slightly rude.
I say “dead” or “died.”
On reddit “unalived” is creeping in. ‘Sam unalived himself’. I’m told this comes from til tok. Wherever it’s from I find it a horrible euphemism.
At work over the past few years the event (I work at a hotel) has become “Celebration of Life”.
No love for “room temperature”?
I was considering posting that-a.r.t. assumed room temperature.
Then again, with what we’ve done to our climate, a 98 degree room may soon be the norm.
Which only further confirms my preference for this place.
For a long while after my Dad died, I preferred “died” instead of “dead”. I can’t justify such a subtle difference anymore, but at the time (I was in my mid-teens) it made sense to me.
Here’s what I found on dictionary.com. Apparently “unalive” is often specifically associated with suicuide, though not exclusively. First observed in 2013 on an episode of some Spiderman cartoon, but there’s also this:
The social media use of unalive in the context of suicide increased in early 2022 on TikTok. The emergence of this use is thought to be related to TikTok policies prohibiting content related to self-harm, including removal of the hashtag #suicide as well as removal of content that uses the word suicide.
TikTok users began using unalive as a way to circumvent these restrictions, including in both in serious and nonserious posts. Variations of the term have also been used, including as hashtags. Such use has since spread to other social media sites.
I don’t usually say “passed away” or any of the other terms. Especially when it comes to my son. I say, “my son died”. To say he passed away seems to sugar-coat it. And there’s nothing sugary about it to me.
Reading thru some newspaper obits from the 1940’s, here is some of the terminology used at the time. All of these examples are from one obituary, but duplicated in others:
[name] entered into rest…absent from the body, present with the Lord…Deceased was of the [company].
[name]'s body at [funeral home].
I’ve also noticed people using “took his own life,” rather than saying “committed suicide.” I suppose it sounds less harsh.
I’m liable to say “died” when talking about those I don’t know personally, particularly celebrities. For example, I will say that Burt Bacharach died, not that he passed away. “Passed away” or “passed on” (but not just “passed”) I more frequently use when I’m talking about someone I actually knew, or I’m talking to someone who knew them.
Me as well. I am always looking for words and phrases to avoid euphemisms.