Why such coyness?
A full half century ago, as a junior reporter on the Montgomeryshire Express and Radnor Times in Newtown, I was instructed by my editor, the late Russell Evans, that anybody removed from his or her home by the undertaker's men in a wooden box was "dead".
A full half century ago, as a junior reporter on the Montgomeryshire Express and Radnor Times in Newtown, I was instructed by my editor, the late Russell Evans, that anybody removed from his or her home by the undertaker's men in a wooden box was (barring monumental incompetence) "dead".
There was no evidence that the deceased had, for example, "been called to higher service", "gone to a better place", "been taken to sit at the Lord's right hand" or engaged in any one of a number of similarly unlikely feats such as (always number one in the obituary charts) "passed away".
As my career progressed I vowed to banish such ghastly euphemisms from any publication over which I had control, and as editor of the Border Counties Advertizer some years later I ruled that the verb "to die" should and would stand in place of all of them.
Even our local funeral directors, relieved of the responsibility for steering the bereaved towards a sensitive term for snuffing it, went along with me. Gradually, I noticed, so did newspapers generally - though I do not, of course, claim credit for a national trend towards abandoning such anachronistic terminology.
How sad, then, that a recent tally of the obituaries page of the Shropshire Star reveals 100 per cent use of the term "passed away" in preference to "died" for the recently dead.
Do your readers really believe that the word "dead" is too strong a term? I am intrigued!
Sam Evans, Oswestry
