My friend told me about a conversation she had with a teacher who was ranting about the intensity and rigour of the teacher training programme when she was a trainee. She said the teacher said something along the lines of:

“The course was so challenging and time-consuming to a point that she lost her husband.”

Wait a minute. She lost her husband? I was not expecting this. Is teaching really so bad that your spouse would drive himself to death? Those were my first thoughts upon hearing her words. Probably because she saw how stunned I was, she clarified that she meant that the husband had filed for a divorce. It turns out that I had misinterpreted the word ‘lost’ and associated it with the ‘loss of life’; or to be as literal as possible, ‘death’. Why was it so easy for me to create this association and, therefore, understanding which ended up being so far from the truth?

Although it is an inevitable aspect of life, ‘death’ is taboo in many parts of the world to the extent that we have been brought up with so many other (creative) ways of talking about it. To name a few, I can think of passed away, passed on, gone to heaven, and the well-known idiom, kicked the bucket. More interesting terms to add to the inventory of ‘euphemisms for death’ include the likes of snuffed it, bit the dust and pushing up daisies. It is intriguing how there are numerous elaborate ways of addressing something in the English language that is innately part of human life. These euphemisms, which are essentially synonyms, are one of the many affordances of language, offering us numerous lexical alternatives. However, these terms could be easily misinterpreted, rendering their use prone to confusion. Imagine a friend lamenting to you, “I lost my dog,” and in reply, you say, “I hope you find him soon,” only for those words to be the catalyst for an outburst of tears because you later find out that the dog was not missing, but dead. It would be awkward and embarrassing to misunderstand someone in such situations.

‘Die’, together with its lexemes, indicate finality. While some believe that it would be too direct and crude to say, “My friend died,” others argue that saying, “My friend passed away” does not do justice to the life lived. It makes it seem as if life had literally gone from point A to B and vanished like smoke into thin air, whereas being direct and acknowledging death in a literal sense would reflect the life lived in the first place.

An internet search on various forums has shown that there are varying preferences as to whether to use euphemisms or be direct. Death is a sensitive topic especially if someone has died unexpectedly. Ultimately, it is up to you to make a judgement, based on the context and the person/people receiving this tragic message, when to use which term.