This post is a continuation of "Death and the Afterlife #1", a blogpost from July 2020.
Authors' Note:
gonif (Yiddish): thief or crook.Shemayim (Hebrew): heaven
Authors' Note: We were inspired, in studying the enigmatic final chapter of existence, to find that OEDILF, as of mid-2022, has about 150 submissions that deal with the subject of 'death'. That research shows that the spectre of death underscores many linguistic idioms.
getting off cheap: an idiom, perhaps further towards the slang end of the scale, in comparison with getting off easy
sick to death of: a cliché, only rarely entailing the imminent demise of the subject
to die in your sleep: a cliché, albeit puzzling biologically
survive to a ripe old age: a cliché; here also used as the basis of a pun
Authors' Note: The above verse was inspired by an essay by Mal Abrams, who named the eternally unsatisfactory restaurant 'Feh'.
Author's Note: Although the short forms 'Will' and 'Bill' may be casually interchanged as first names (short forms of ‘William’), the nouns 'will' (as in 'last will and testament') and 'bill' are generally used with more careful scrutiny. ‘Will’ and ‘testament’ being essentially synonyms, the expression is a prototypical example of the redundant binomial expressions that seem to be loved by lawyers.
Subtle differences in the form of idioms may underwrite important differences in meaning. ‘At last’ and ‘at the last’ seem similar, but in fact their usage and meaning differs considerably.
Authors' Note: In some jurisdictions, all deaths in a long-term nursing facility must be reported to the office of the coroner.
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