De Nile Ain't Just A River in Egypt

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

As part of my research for a seminar on Death and Dying that I am presenting at Home Based Spiritual Care today, I was looking for some of the euphemisms we use to avoid the "D" word.

Without getting into the debate over whether the use of euphemisms is an effective coping skill or a form of denial which interferes with the grieving process, I was amazed to discover the plethora of words or expressions often used instead of the words death or dead. (I suspect they are sometimes beneficial coping methods and sometimes denial.) Here is the list I discovered:

This collection contains more than 200 euphemisms, metaphors used in place of the words dying, death or dead, and some of the often amusing slang expressions that people use when talking about death or dying.

A - C Terms:

A long sleep, A race well run, Angels carried him/her away, Annihilated, Asleep in Christ, Ate it, Be all over with one, Be no more, Be taken, Bills of mortality, Bit the dust, Blew him/herself away, Bought the farm, Break one's neck, Breathe one's last, Breathed the last, Buy the farm, Called home, Came to an end, Cashed in, Catch one's death, Cease to breathe, Cease to live, Cessation of life, Changed form, Chant du cygne (French for swansong), Checked out, Close one's eyes, Come to an untimely end, Come to dust, Consigned to earth, Croaked, Cross the bar, Cross the Stygian ferry, Crossed over Jordan, Curtains.

D - E Terms:

Dead drop, Death doom, Death knocks at the door, Death song, Death stares one in the face, Debt of nature, Definitely Done Dancing, Depart this life, Departed, Departure, Die, Die a natural death, Die a violent death, Down dead, Drop dead, Drop into the grave, Drop off, Dropped the body, Dust to dust, Dying agonies, Dying breath, Dying day, Ebb of life, End of life, End one's days, End one's earthly career, End one's life, Ended it all, Eternal rest, Expire, Expired, Extinction of life.

F - H Terms:

Fall, Fall dead, Fall down, Feeling no pain, Fell asleep in the arms of Jesus,Final chapter, Final curtain call, For whom the bell tolls, Found everlasting peace, Gave it up, Gave up the ghost, Getting Bagged, Give up the ghost, Go off, Go off the hooks, Go out like the snuff of a candle, Go the way of all flesh, Go to Davy Jones's locker, Go to one's last home, Go to one's long account, Go to the wall, God took him/her, Goes to his/her heavenly father, Gone to heaven, Gone to his/her reward, Hand in one's checks, Hand in one's chips, Hand of death, Hell's grim Tyrant, His/her time was up, Hop the twig.

I - L Terms:

Iced,” I’m comin', Elizabeth”, In adamantine chains shall death be bound, In the arms of the Father, In the great beyond, It was curtains, Jaws of death, Join the greater number, Join the majority, Kick the bucket, Kicked the bucket, King Death, King of terrors, Knocking on heaven's door, Laid to rest, Last agonies, Last, breath, Last gasp, Lay down one's life, Left this world, Left us, Life ebbs, Life fails, Life hangs by a thread, Liquidated, Lose one's life, Loss, Loss of life, Lost.

M - O Terms:

Made the change, Make one's will, Meet one's death, Meet one's end, Met his/her Maker, No longer with us, Offed himself/herself, On the heavenly shores, On the other side, On ice, One’s days are numbered, One’s doom is sealed, One’s hour is come, One’s race is run, Out of his/her misery.

P - S Terms:

Pass away, Pass in one's checks, Pass in one's chips [U.S.] ,Passed away ,Passed on, Passing, Pay the debt to nature, Perish, Perished, Pop off, Post mortem, Pushing up daisies, Quietus, Reached the finish line, Receive one's death warrant, Release, Relinquish one's life, Resign one's being, Resign one's breath, Resign one's life, Rest, Resting in peace, Returned to dust, Returned to the source, Rigor mortis, Rubbed out, Shadow of the Valley of Death, Shuffle off this mortal coil, Sink into the grave, Six feet under, Snuffed, Spake the grisly Terror, Step out, Stygian shore ,Succumbed, Surrender one's life ,Swan song.

T - Z Terms:

Take one's last sleep, Taking the dirt nap, Terminated, That was all she wrote,The breath is out of the body, The grave closes over one, The lone couch of this everlasting sleep, Transcended, Translated into glory, Turn to dust, Turn up one's toes, Untimely end, Valley of death, Was a goner, Was done in, Wasted, Watery grave, Went to a new life, Went to his/her eternal reward, With the angels, Withered away, Yield one's breath, Yield up the ghost.

Twenty-first-century human beings live in a culture in which "dead" is a four-letter word. Because four-letter words have a reputation for being obscene, death is obscene to modern sensibilities; that is, to those in modern death-denying cultures who rarely have firsthand experiences with the dying and the dead. Modernity has afforded people the ability to hide the dying process from public view; and often people see the dead body of a loved one to be so polluting that they pay strangers to dispose of "it" properly. The modern mind can abstract death, further buffering itself from death's horror, through the use of metaphor and euphemism when describing the dead. In daily conversations the deceased tend to pass or fade away, embark on a desired trip to meet their eternal reward or loved ones ("Grandpa is back with Grandma"), or merely fall asleep ("She earned her rest").

Some scholars argue that our circumlocutions should be understood as evidence of death denial, as should such colorful expressions as "buying the farm," "pushing up daisies," or "kicking the bucket." On the other hand, euphemism has a long tradition of use when dealing with the topic of death, and the use of metaphor is often inevitable when trying to explain certain facets of the human condition, particularly death.

Humans are symbolic creatures, perceiving and experiencing their social worlds largely through their symbols, many of which are figurative and metaphoric. Instead of understanding metaphors as embellishments of facts, they are better conceived as ways in which these facts are experienced, filtering and shaping apprehensions of social reality and understandings of things about which they are unfamiliar—like death.

Distinctive metaphors and euphemisms have emerged from the various social institutions directly involved with death. The more powerful the institution, the more likely its metaphors leak into everyday parlance and produce common world-views. Over the twentieth century, these have included the military, medical, and political orders— the social institutions primarily responsible for death control.

Twentieth-century militarism had a powerful effect on death's metaphoric framings. In George Orwell's futuristic novel Nineteen Eighty-four(1949), the Ministry of Truth proclaimed "War is peace." In the twenty-first century war is "pacification." The military sanitizes its lethal activities through benign labels (e.g., the Nazis assigning carloads of concentration camp–bound to Sonderbehandlung, meaning "special treatment") or by dehumanizing its enemies (who are "fumigated," "exterminated," or "wasted" like cockroaches and rats). In Doublespeak (1989), William Lutz distinguishes euphemism, which covers the unpleasant, from doublespeak, whose purpose is to deceive and mislead. To illustrate the latter, he noted how the U.S. State Department replaced "killing" with "unlawful deprivation of life." Dead enemy soldiers are "decommissioned aggressor quantum." Deaths of innocent civilians are referred to as "collateral damage." When commandos parachuted in the early 1980s American invasion of Grenada, the Pentagon referred to the action as a "predawn vertical insertion."

In Illness As Metaphor (1978), Susan Sontag describes the military metaphors applied to disease, the alien invaders that breach bodily defense systems necessitating surgical, chemical, or radiation counterattacks. The frontline in the cultural war against death is the medical establishment. Here death has long been viewed as failure, giving rise to a host of clinically detached euphemisms. Patients "go sour," their respirations cease, or they are simply "no longer with us." Emergency room nurses make references to someone being "DDD" ("definitely done dancing") or "getting bagged."

The euphemisms extend to those most likely to die—those who have lived the longest lives. The most death prone are not "old people" but rather "senior citizens," "Golden Agers," or simply "the mature." They die in "homes"—rest homes, nursing homes, retirement homes—where they are too often deindividualized and victimized by under-paid staff.

In the political arena, heated battles on the moralities of abortion and euthanasia have produced a new language for death-related matters. In the contest between social movements supporting or opposing legalized abortion and euthanasia has emerged the self-referencing "pro-choice" and "pro-life" labels. For those opposing assisted or accelerated death, "active euthanasia" is a euphemism for murder. For proponents, the practice of keeping the terminally ill alive on hi-tech life supports is "technological torturing" of the dying.

Crisp mortality references often enter into American parlance when referring to nonthanatological matters. People often "die" symbolically, as when failing in their social performances. One certainly does not want to be "dead wrong," an office "deadwood," a "deadbeat" father, or within a "dead-end" job. Companies may adopt a "poison pill" defense against a hostile takeover attempt, leaving workers worried about being "axed" or appearing on "Schindler's List." The symbolic potency of such death metaphors rise with increases in the centrality of work roles to the identities of men and women. Studies have shown that when a business facility shuts down workers often go through the deathlike stages described by the death expert Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. A late 1980s survey of Richmond, Virginia, entrepreneurs published in the Wall Street Journal cited nearly six in ten saying failure was the incident they feared most, with fear of death being but a distant third for both sexes. And when the worker actually does die, he or she dies metaphorically in occupationally unique ways: Deceased soldiers "answer their last roll call," chefs "lay down their knife and fork," actors "make a final exit," and boxers "take the last count."

Among those whose job it is to deal with the dead, death professionals as scholar Michael Lesy calls them, metaphors arising from their humor produce the death desensitizations required for them to cope with society's "dirty work." Among themselves, funeral directors, for instance, refer to embalming as "pickling" or "curing the ham," cremation as "shake and bake," and coffins as "tin cans." When dealing with the public, the "patient" (not the corpse) is "interred" (not buried) within a "casket" (not coffin) beneath a "monument" (not tombstone).

So what do all of these colorful, humorous, consoling, deceptive, demeaning, and frightful framings of death mean? Are they useful? The metaphors and euphemisms that people apply to the dying and the dead shape the way the living now see their connection with the dead. They can sanitize the profound pollution posed by a decaying corpse and assuage the profound moral guilt of collective murder during times of war. They can reaffirm the meaningfulness of the deceased's life ("He lives with us all") or degrade their very existence ("The vermin were whacked").

Perhaps another way to think about the matter is to ask how many words there are that solely capture the single fact that this person or creature is no more. "He died" is the simplest way English speakers can make the point. From there on, everything is an elaboration of a phenomenon of which none of the living has any direct knowledge. The military borrows from the medical when it conducts its surgical operations to remove "the cancer"; the medical from the military in its "wars against enemy diseases." In sum, metaphors and euphemisms for death are employed as both shields and weapons, to cover the unpleasant or distasteful aspects of mortality, or to apply the power of death to reinforce the significance of certain events among the living.