Language of Death

Studies on Euphemisms

Questioning about death and beyond has been an ontological matter that goes back to the origins of mankind; however, there was little scientific concern about it up to the past century. As early as 1936, Louise Pound began reflecting upon American euphemisms fordying, death, and burial, but it is only more recently that scholars in the field of human sciences have begun researching how language is appropriated in communications about death and dying.

Subsequently, scholars point out that in the mid-19th century a shift in the conceptualization [Page 633]of death occurred. Prior to the Romantic period, the language of death was replete with expressions such as to pass over, to go home, to (be carried to) rest, to fall asleep. These expressions were intended to help survivors cope with their loss, or rather the event of death itself. According to the anthropological point of view, death is a timeless taboo, the naming of which usually calls up superstition of contamination from the concept to the object. This is useful to explain the universal use of metaphors, euphemisms, and slang to represent death, dying, the deceased, and burial. The use of metaphor is pervasive, as shown in studies on primitive societies. Besides, in civilizations with written traditions, while literary works never really considered the moral interdiction, the language of death continued to flourish, and a rich semantic field developed around the typology of death.

Nowadays, the language of death is expressed through the vernacular, but also the religious, the medical, the legal, and other scientific terminologies (demography, sociology, etc.). Most of them have euphemistic ground: For example, cemetery comes from the Greek word for “dormitory,” euthanasia from “good death,” and casualty meant “accidental loss” up to the Crimean War. The study of etymology also shows that the use of metaphors has a long tradition in the reference to death and the technical concepts inherited from it. In some cases, the linguistic turns soften the approach to death, whereas in others they bring forth value interpretation (e.g., suicide vs. autolysis, euthanasia vs. well dying). Contemporary concern is to avoid social stigma and moral judgment; thus the language of death is contextually dependent.

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