Never Say Die / Real Life

• According to AP Style, you NEVER use any euphemisms for death, whether while reporting general news or writing an obituary/death notice.
• This quote is popular among some computer programmers:
  "C programmers never die. They are just cast into void."
  • This is based on the quote, "Old soldiers don't die, they just fade away."
  • This actually comes from the C language itself. When you cast off a variable, it disappears.
• There's also a variant for BASIC programmers, coupled with a subtle Take That! against the language itself:
  "BASIC programmers never die. They GOSUB and don't RETURN." ^note Most early forms of BASIC didn't have user-defined functions like you'd find in modern languages like C or Javascript. Instead they used what are called subroutines, which are essentially GOTO labels that remember where you left off from. Since GOTO is historically considered a Scrappy Mechanic of old programming languages, its badness rubs off on GOSUB/RETURN as well.
• Some gamers invert this by referring to everything that takes something out of the game as death. Even in pen-and-paper roleplaying games, it's not uncommon to hear "unconscious" referred to as "dead". This also applies to conversations regarding video games and collectible card games where defeated characters are not killed and could be revived later, such as in Pokémon (where they are consistently called "fainted" or "knocked out" and can indeed return to consciousness with ease). Even if the player is controlling a drone or other unliving object In-Universe, they're still likely to say "I died" when the thing they're controlling is wrecked.
• Poison safety information directed to children will state the side-effects of poison as being sick, as death is pretty harsh for a child. This is mostly effective, as children generally do not like being sick.
• Paul Erdos, a very famous and highly eccentric mathematician, had a very unique vocabulary, where people who stopped doing math had "died", and people who actually died had "left".
• All cadets except seniors in the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets are not allowed to say the words "die" or "death." If they do and are caught doing so, they are typically forced to do push-up. However, most people are too lazy to punish anyone but a freshman.
• Real Life EMT/Paramedic training averts this. You're not supposed to use euphemisms like "passed away" or "no longer with us" when delivering the bad news to family members, as it raises stress by equivocating and hedging around the reality of a loved one's death, and may not be understood by people with limited English.^note This got lampshaded in an episode of Scrubs, the first time Keith had to tell a patient he was going to die. He reported back to J.D. and Turk that he'd told the patient there was nothing more they could do for him, but they'd try to make him comfortable.
  J.D.: Yeah. I'm gonna need you to go back in there and use some form of the word "die": "dead", "dying", "deadsies", "deadwood". Your choice.
  Keith: What was the middle one?
  J.D.: Deadsies.
  (Keith goes to talk to the patient again)
  Turk: Deadwood?
  J.D.: Did you know cowboys used to curse?
• Similarly, the children's picture book A Terrible Thing Happened notes in its Parents and Caregivers section that it's really best to avoid the use of euphemisms in real life when speaking with a child who has witnessed death or any type of traumatic event. Though it might seem comforting to adults, it's only likely to confuse the child that may already be having trouble processing their feelings about what they witnessed. Helping Children Cope With Grief, by Rosemary Wells, also specifically advises against the use of euphemisms.
• Insurance companies and memorial parlors never mention “funeral costs” in their advertising, referring instead to “final expenses”
• Subverted in the case of crime scene investigators, whose notes and reports are not supposed to out-and-out say "dead" in reference to a victim's body—not out of any squeamishness or sensitivities, but due to legal technicalities. Only a trained medical authority—usually the medical examiner—can legally declare death, and saying "dead body" or "corpse" or the like will result in a defense attorney challenging these statements in court as signs that you're overstepping your authority or unduly prejudiced towards the case in question (i.e. "Did you believe this case was a homicide before you could objectively determine what happened?"), putting a dent in the reliability of your testimony. Referring to someone as being deceased is therefore avoided in these contexts, unless someone with the authority to do so has already declared death, or the body is decapitated, heavily mutilated, or in an advanced enough state of decomposition that there's clearly no reason to believe the person can still be alive. Even then crime scene investigators may tend not to say "dead", to avoid forming bad habits that may lead to future slip-ups.
• Inverted in Unix/BSD/Linux operating systems: processes may be merely sleeping, defunct (aka zombies) and may be killed. For the curious, a process becomes a zombie because its parent process hasn't destroyed it properly. That's the reason why lectures about * nixes should be behind closed doors. As someone overhearing killing childs, zombies etc. might interpret it differently than the people inside (an exclusive group of people not dressing like the rest of world speaking in their language and mentioning zombies and killing children).
• When a Roman consul announced an execution, he said Vixerunt ("They have lived") or some grammatical variation on that to avoid directly mentioning death. In Latin, the perfect tense indicates that an action is now complete, so to say "Marcus Tullius Iucundus has lived" would be the equivalent of saying "Marcus Tullius Iucundus has finished his life."
• Roman Emperors were often declared gods after the end of their lives, which according to some stories led to the dying Vespasian saying "I think I am becoming a god".
• Not only are they not allowed to look at corpses, but traditional Navajos will not say dead or died. If someone died of natural causes, they "took up their living elsewhere." If they died otherwise, they "stopped moving." And it doesn't actually matter whether they're talking Navajo, English, or Spanish; this can apparently cause confusion if, say, Navajo motorists call 911 after witnessing accidents.
• The German language tends to avoid any active usage of "töten" (to kill), especially in present and future tense. Instead, the less ... determined word "umbringen" (lit. to bring down) is used (both of them are equivalents of English "to kill"). Therefore, if someone does actually use "töten" instead of "umbringen", he's damned serious - and you should better run.
  • Then of course, there is a somewhat milder, less formal slang term for "umbringen", "um die Ecke bringen" ("bring someone around the corner").
  • A milder slang term for dying is "abkratzen" ("to scratch off" or "to scratch away").
  • The formal term for animal euthanasia is "Einschläferung" (noun for "put to sleep").
• An Urban Legend regarding Disney Theme Parks is that, to protect their family-friendly image, they will not allow people to declare anyone who dies on Disney property as dead, making them take the bodies off property before they do so. This myth stems from standard medical procedures: since a person isn't usually considered dead until they're officially pronounced dead by someone who can legally do so, that means that a person won't encounter a doctor, medical examiner, etc., until they're off park grounds and in a hospital, so they won't be legally dead until then. It isn't true, though; a small number of people have in fact been declared dead on Disney property.
• A similar urban legend exists for Las Vegas casinos. They're declared dead wherever they died (and the larger Strip casinos have 10-15 deaths on property per year). It's just generally not discussed with guests and rarely receives major coverage in the news so it doesn't impact tourism.
• Yet another similar urban legend claims that nobody is allowed to be declared dead in the British Houses of Parliament, supposedly because under an ancient law anyone who was would be entitled to a state funeral. In fact, at least four people are known to have died there with no such issue: Guy Fawkes (executed), Sir Walter Raleigh (executed), Spencer Perceval (only UK Prime Minister to be assassinated in office), and Sir Alfred Billson (natural causes).
• In Japanese, the word for "die", "shinu" (死ぬ) is quite blunt and discouraged to be used in polite conversations. The most common word that replaces it is "nakunaru" (亡くなる), which also means "die" but etymologically means "disappear" (it's a character variant of 無くなる, which also means "disappear" but isn't restricted to people dying). There are also many euphemisms; a common one in news reports is "takai suru (他界する)", literally 'other-worlding'. Other examples include 逝去 "seikyo" ^note the "kyo" kanji is also used in the colloquial「世を去る」 "yo wo saru," lit. "leave a world" (has a nuance of sadness) and 永眠 "eimin," which respectively translate literally to "depart" and "eternal sleep."
• Also in Japan, the media typically does not say that a person has died until they are officially declared deceased. During this time, they are often said to be in "cardiac arrest" (example).
• Chinese has hundreds of euphemisms to avoid saying "die" (and a significant subset unique to Cantonese as well), some of which would appear nonsensical without knowing the cultural context. A few examples include: "melon firewood"^note likely from how an improperly stored melon would dry up and shrivel in a way resembling firewood, thus "dead", "paid the bill", "selling salted duck eggs"^note there are several theories on how this came to be: because traditionally salted duck eggs are buried in soil, because they are used as offerings for the dead, or a more complex funeral ritual in which salted duck eggs are used in a way to encourage the dead to let go of their past lives "folded", "switched off the mains", "playing drums with bones", "fragrance vanish and jade destroyed" (female only), "covered with flag", "nailed the cover", "collected the skin", "emigrated", "thanks for chicken"^note chicken is commonly used as a centrepiece of food offerings for ancestor worship, "eating incense", "spending hell banknotes", "taking the step first", "visiting Chairman Mao/Marx/[insert deity or underworld of choice]", "heaven jealous of handsome talent", "riding a crane (the bird) and returning to the west"...
• On the Moth Radio Hour, an airline stewardess told an anecdote about her airline's policy on people dying during flight. Stewardesses are expected to treat them as if they're simply not feeling well because the flight will continue to its destination anyway. When the plane lands, paramedics continue the charade of removing the corpse as if it's in need of medical assistance.
• Appears to have served as a coping mechanism for most soldiers especially during 20th and 21st century wars. Diaries and poems by these soldiers will refer to their comrades as having been "zapped" or "popped" but never "killed". This ties into other coping mechanisms such as during WWI when the hands and arms of soldiers buried in trenches would continually slip out of their shallow graves during rain storms. Soldiers would often shake the dead hands or give them high fives when passing by them. All these methods served to help the soldiers mentally ignore the fact that their best friends all just died.
• "Take No Prisoners" is a euphemism for "Leave No Survivors".
• The euphemism "passed" (not "passed away" or "passed on", just passed) has become increasingly popular during the 2010s. Many examples can be found on this wiki.
• The word for "die" in Malay, "mati", is considered extremely blunt. It's a tradition for parents to teach their children to never use it for the death of humans, because it is akin to comparing them to animals, whose deaths are unambiguously referred to as "mati". The only place where it is commonly used to refer to human deaths is the realm of doctors, medics, and hospitals. "Meninggal" (short for "meninggal dunia", lit. "leave this world") is used everywhere else. A more polite replacement is "wafat", a loanword from Arabic that means "has fulfilled (his/her life)".
• In England it used to be treason to predict the King's death (because rumors of such could lead to political instability). This made even doctors reluctant to tell a royal patient that he was dying and needed to put his affairs in order.
• Prince, according to his ex-wife Mayte Garcia's memoir could never really admit out loud that their son Amiir (who only lived one week) died. Oprah Winfrey visited their home for an interview shortly after Amiir's birth/death. He showed her the baby room that he'd had built and talked about his future parenthood without ever acknowledging the baby itself. Mayte tried to nudge him by admitting that "I was pregnant" but he still kept up the act.
• Given how blunt and prone to Black Comedy and Crossing the Line Twice as Vietnamese humor can be, and how euphemistic and polite the language can be, euphemisms for death run the gamut. Listing examples would take all day. On the comedic end, there's "lên nóc tủ" (going to sit on top of the wardrobe), sometimes with "ngắm gà khỏa thân" (ogling naked chicken) or "ăn chuối cả nải" (eating bananas by the bunch). This is a reference to ancestor worship, because the family altar is meant to be in the highest spot in the house, and common offerings are whole boiled chickens and intact bunches of bananas. Hanoians might say someone has "gone to Văn Điển" (the name of the city cemetery). Politely and commonly, a dead person is "mất" (lost). Anyone who has died in an accident has "tử vong" (dead and gone, but it's a Sino-Vietnamese loanword, which is commonly used for euphemisms and softening the blow). Plain rude options are "ngỏm" or "toi", roughly equivalent to "deader than a doornail". "Going to meet [ancestors]/[grandparents]/Uncle Hồ" is popular for staunch communists, and Hồ Chí Minh himself said in his will that he was going to meet with Marx, Lenin, and other deceased leaders. The direct equivalent of "die", "chết", is not rude, but not polite either. People usually default to "mất".
• One of the oddest death euphemisms is the traditional Viennese "took the 71". This refers to the Vienna streetcar route 71 linking the city centre with the huge Zentralfriedhof cemetery.
• On YouTube and TikTok, speech-detecting algorithms scan videos for use of words such as "die", "dead", "killed", and especially any variant of "suicide" or "kill(ing) oneself." Videos with such words are often sanctioned by platforms due to "violent content," and their likelihood of being promoted or recommended to others tanks. Therefore, a series of euphemisms have sprung up on these platforms, associated mainly with Gen Z, such as "to unalive (oneself)." Gen Z is not any more squeamish about death than any other generation; these terms exist almost exclusively on these video platforms as a means of getting around the algorithm. However, it is worth mentioning that use of these terms tends to subject to a great deal of scrutiny and criticism from audiences, who see such 'algospeak' (neologisms used to dodge scrutiny by internet algorithms) as disrespectful to people who died, especially in the context of murders, suicide, accidents, and disasters. This is even more noticeable in situations where the content creator discussing such videos is monetised, as it becomes clear that the only real reason why they aren't saying the actual words is so they don't lose ad revenue.

---