Death and bucket-kicking Part 1

'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.  

The first category of words that mean 'to die' consists of, as one would expect, words that denote completion, for example, 'end', 'finish' and other words that carry a similar meaning. Here's an example of an early use of one such word, a French import, taken from the Pearl poem:

I don't know about other students of medieval literature but when I first read this as a student, I didn't even know there was any reference to death. The word in its unanglicised form could not have much currency and I very much doubt it survived beyond Middle English but Shakespeare certainly used 'finish' to mean 'die' although even then, it was not commonly used. More common was 'end' which continued for a few hundred years but it requires today other words to go with it, e.g., 'end up dead'.  

'Determine' is another similar word but today, except for a specific legal usage, it carries an entirely different meaning. Here's an example of its use from Chaucer:

It's not surprising that verbs that bear the meaning of completion or an end are used as euphemisms for 'to die'. Next on the list are words that denote travelling or going on a journey and this is our second category of words which I will talk about in my next blog post on this subject. It can also take the form of a call to go on a journey, e.g. 'called home to God, etc'  which is beloved of obituary-writers. But more of that in the next blog post.

The highlighting of quotations took less time than I expected and I still have two hours before the New Year. Here's wishing all my readers a most joyous New Year and may death and all things bad be as far from you and your loved ones as possible.