I had the impression that in recent years it has slowly become more broad in its meaning, as many words and terms do—but that when I was young it meant dying very peacefully, in your sleep or at least in bed. So I found it jarring to increasingly see people say someone “passed away” from an explosion, or a fall from a great height or whatever.
But it has occurred to me that I may have always just assumed that was the specific meaning, because the imagery of the phrasing is so suggestive of that kind of death. But maybe even when I was a kid it was intended to mean any kind of death, and I just didn’t notice it until recently. Does anyone have old dictionaries or some way to trace the understanding of this term? I imagine it’s tricky, because in so many cases you can’t tell if it’s meant as a specific kind of death or just death in general.
So I guess the real question is whether back in the 1980s or earlier, people ever said “So and so passed away in a flaming motorcycle wreck this afternoon, being pronounced dead at the scene.”
My understanding (and of course YMMV) is that the person PASSED, and then sometimes the add-ons were ‘away peacefully’, ‘tragically’ and ‘unexpectedly’ to denote old age/chronic illness, an accident (or suicide) and a sudden illness respectively.
My understanding was the complete opposite - once “passed away” had been firmly fixed as a euphemism for “died”, people started abbreviating it to “passed”, because the “away” was understood.
Looking at the ngram viewer results for the phrase is interesting. You do see individual people “passing away” as early as the nineteenth century, but that big bulge in the middle is mostly not that - it’s a whole heap of Bible references (“heaven and earth had passed away”), plus “former generations” (rather than individuals) passing away, plus even quite mundane things like a person travelling to another town “passing away” by going down the road.
I’m 61 and always associated the phrase with death by any means, peaceful or unpleasant.
“He passed away peacefully” or “She passed away after a long, hard battle with cancer” or “They passed away in the fire and collapse of the building” were all normal phrases.
My take: there’s sort of a taboo about the “d” word among some people. So euphemisms are used instead. “Passed away” is a very gentile way of putting it.
Also because of such superstition-like attitudes, discussing how a person went to meet their maker is to be avoided. So they are all lumped together.
Off topic: How can you tell that from the Google ngram statistics? Is there a way to exclude certain texts (like, say, the Bible) from the corpus? Sorry, I’m kinda stupid about these things!
Delicate little ladies might get the vapors if you mentioned the D word. So you said “passed away”. Later, behind closed doors, you might discreetly inquire about the cause of death.
Agreed that “passed away” just means “died.” People say passed away because they want a euphemism to soft pedal the death. So, I might expect to hear, “she passed away last year” with no elaboration from someone who wants to spare me the details. If they were going to tell me, “she was doused in battery acid and gasoline, set on fire, and chucked into a wood chipper,” saying she “passed away” isn’t doing a lot of message softening so I wouldn’t expect them to say passed away in the first place.
Yes. I’m not quite as old as Qsdgop, but I have always interpreted it as a euphemism for any sort of death, peaceful, violent, whatever. I think it’s meant to reference the moment the soul passes out of the body.
What? Hard no on the last one, from this native English speaker. “Passed away” can be used for a violent death, but not if the violent circumstances are said in the same breath.
“Morgan passed away” (from a gunshot wound, but I don’t want to talk about it) = ok
“Morgan got shot and immediately passed away” = not idiomatic
“Morgan got shot and one week later passed away in their hospital bed” = ok
Well, I’m 21 years older than Q t M and I don’t think I heard it much when I was young and I never use it. The newspapers have a page labeled “deaths”, not “passages”.
I’ve noticed ‘passed away’ being used more frequently by the police when announcing deaths to the public.
Used to be you’d hear, “seven people were killed in the crash”. Now, it’s more like “seven people passed away” in it. Or, after a shooting, “seven people passed away after the sniper opened fire”. I find this newer use almost jarring since, as the OP said, ‘passed away’ used to imply peacefully.
