One Of Terry's Corners Of the Online World

One of my newest pet peeves is the creeping religiosity in the language as she is spoke. I'm weary of people who say that dead people pass. Nuh uh, Dead people, of whom I've seen a few, do a number of things. They rot, they smell, they look waxy and unlike themselves, they seem smaller than they did in life, they just aren't there any more and they're really shit conversationalists. But passing? Nope they're way beyond anything so dynamic.

The choice of that word has theological implications with which I'm uncomfortable. From my viewpoint, it's crassly dishonest to pin your hopes on an afterlife or reincarnation. It offers false comfort and false hope. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be gentle with the bereaved. We should. A hole has opened up in their lives and the edges of it are raw and painful and it will heal with a scar. (There are exceptions. When my father died last year, the scars were already there and long healed.)

One of the things that pissed me off at the time was people saying that they were sorry my father had passed. Politely, I corrected their wording.

The other one is bless. People say bless you when you sneeze as if aerosol snot requires divine intervention. Every fortunate bastard these days tells the world they feel blessed, as if cosmic entities give a shit who wins an ephemeral award or a sporting competition. Maybe God put a bet on...

Maybe there's an agenda in the word choices, maybe not, but I object to people assuming that I'm theologically superstitious in the same way that I don't like people assuming that I follow a football team.