![\"Coffin\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/81\/2016\/02\/Coffin.jpg\")
<\/a>\nYesterday I heard on the news the announcement that former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had passed away. He served in the last decade of the twentieth century during the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, and the breakup of Yugoslavia. I\u2019ll let others reflect on his effectiveness in those years. Although I did find myself thinking of those who step up in hard times and try to do good.<\/p>\n
But, actually, for these brief words, I found how much I was annoyed by hearing he had passed away, rather than the more direct, and to my ear honest \u201cdied.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve long found the phrase \u201cpassed away\u201d sticks in my craw. I\u2019m certainly not alone in this. As blogger Brian Jay Stanley observed, \u201cIt is a kind of leaving off, a gesture of open-endedness, an ellipsis at sentence\u2019s end. It is, accordingly, the perfect word for the skeptical yet sentimental modern mind, which cannot accept annihilation, nor easily believe in immortality. \u2018Passed away\u2019 allows vague hope without dogma, as if to say, \u2018He has gone somewhere else, please don\u2019t ask for details.\u2019\u201d The vagueness is what annoys me. Well, that and its contraction into the single word \u201cpassed.\u201d<\/p>\n
I just assumed, along with Mr Stanley, that such a mushy term would be of recent coinage. But thanks to the google machine I decided to find out when and where it did come from. I was pretty surprised to discover the earliest usage in English traces back to the fourteenth century. The Lay Folks Mass Book published in 1375 contains the line \u201cGod lord graunt\u2026 rest and pese pat lastis ay to christen soules passed away.\u201d <\/p>\n
So, there we go. Shouldn\u2019t have been surprised at all. Euphemism in the face of death is simply ubiquitous\u2026<\/p>\n
Maybe some day we\u2019ll grow up.<\/p>\n
But, probably not\u2026<\/p>\n