DEATH and the AFTERLIFE #2

 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.

DIRECTION FOR WEB-TRAVELLERS: 

To resume daily titillations on our related blog 'Daily Illustrated Nonsense', click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time frame of interest from the calendar-based listings in the righthand margin, and check the daily offerings for any month in the years 2020 to the present. (As of September 2023, there are over 1200 unique entries available on the Daily blog, and most of these are also presented here on 'Edifying Nonsense' in topic-based collections.) The 'Daily' format has the advantage of including some videos and other material that are not shown here on this topic-based blog.