'Death' and other words relating to death and dying are generally considered inauspicious and are not acceptable in speech or writing particularly during the 15 days of the Chinese New Year which begins tomorrow (which means I only have two and a half hours to work on this if I want to keep to tradition). However inauspicious the word may be to Chinese people, the Chinese language is straightforward in its description of death. It's simply 死 with no euphemisms to soften the blow of its inauspiciousness.
The English language, however, is very different. If you include Old English and Middle English words, for the verb alone, English has more than 120 words for 'to die' if you accept the OED as accurate.
The language of death is very large in its scope and cannot be adequately covered in a few blog posts. Since time is of the essence and I have slightly more than two hours left before the stroke of midnight, I will begin by taking a quick look at a few words in this first Part of 'Death and bucket-kicking'. I can put my old undergrad books to good use by taking photos of some of the quotations and posting them on this blog post, especially quotations that include a few letters not found on my keyboard. I'm afraid I can only cope with Middle English from the late medieval period and if I do make references to anything before that period, which I probably won't, I'll merely be repeating what the OED has to say.
