Category Archives: Words

There exists in the English language a tendency towards circumlocution when a dead body is mentioned; this leads to a series of euphemisms, many of them derived from Latin roots. “Corpse” is a good example.

Then there is the odd term “mortician”, which seems to have arisen during the nineteenth century. Evidently the circumlocution “undertaker” was still too vivid for peoples’ imaginations! The suffix “ician” is also used in the word “musician”, which would lead you to think that a mortician is someone who practices death as an occupation.

I’m reminded of the vivid slang word “stiff”, familiar to those who read detective and mystery novels. That word seems to have come from gangsters’ and criminals’ lingo during the Prohibition era.

Dead bodies are indeed unsettling. The contrast between the living and the dead is just too much for many people to handle and we retreat into euphemism or fantasies of resurrection. The current craze for zombie literature and film is one manifestation. When we die we might come back as pale and scarred beings with a taste for violence and blood — it’s still better than the alternative! A would-be zombie woman:

I’m fond of the obsolete Old English term “lich”:

Lich \Lich\ (l[i^]ch), n. [AS. l[imac]c body. See {Like}, a.]
A dead body; a corpse. [Obs.]

{Lich fowl} (Zool.), the European goatsucker; — called also
{lich owl}.

{Lich gate}, a covered gate through which the corpse was
carried to the church or burial place, and where the bier
was placed to await the clergyman; a corpse gate. [Prov.
Eng.] –Halliwell.

{Lich wake}, the wake, or watching, held over a corpse before
burial. [Prov Eng.] –Chaucer.

{Lich wall}, the wall of a churchyard or burying ground.

{Lich way}, the path by which the dead are carried to the
grave. [Prov. Eng.]

I was tickled to learn the term “lich fowl”. People historically have been suspicious of members of the avian goatsucker clan; the phrase reflects an ancient but erroneous belief that goatsuckers make nocturnal visits to dairy animals and steal milk. The local whippoorwill is one of our resident goatsuckers here in North America, and I can attest that encountering that bird at night does indeed give me a start every time.

Lately I’ve been delivering newspapers on a motor route in rural Adams County, Illinois. I enjoy the work, as it enables me to periodically drive through rural landscapes and see what there is to see. If I see something interesting I’ll stop and investigate, camera at my side.

I’d driven by the Fall Creek Chapel cemetery several times before I stopped and wandered around for a while:

I always gravitate towards the older tombstones in any cemetery. I particularly like seeing stones whose inscription is fading towards illegibility, a metaphor for every human’s posthumous fate in the surviving memories of friends and families.

Here’s an example:

This man lived a long life for his time; with an eighteenth century birth he must have been born in the Old World. The surname “Thompson” suggests a British origin. The lower inscription has succumbed to decades of weathering.

The “hopeful finger” is a recurring gravestone motif. Onward and upward!

Scroll back up to the first picture in this post (no, not the zombie woman — the next one down!). Look behind the metal cemetery sign and you will see a green mass humping up from the closely-shorn sward.

This thicket piqued my curiosity. There’s always a reason an area doesn’t get mowed. I peered into the greenery and saw that it was mostly mulberry sprouts and wild grapevines with a few pre-bloom goldenrods eking out a tenuous existence amidst such fierce competition. I got down on my hands and knees and wormed my way into the mysterious depths. It was sunny and ninety-five degrees that morning but the humidity was low and insects ignored me.

I found a concrete wall with an angled and peaked contour which evidently was intended to demarcate a family plot. The largest tombstone had given up the ghost, so to speak, and was lying comfortably on its back while slowly sinking into the root-filled humusy soil. A photo:

I cleared away sprouts and vines as well as accumulated fallen leaves and found this barely-legible inscription:

Henry, the son of someone, seemed to have died in 1862. Children died easily back then.

I scrambled in a little farther and found this sun-dappled stone:

How sad — the grave of a four-year-old girl named Katie Mable. I couldn’t figure out what the carving at the top was supposed to represent. Some sort of fruit? The hanging fruit on the left looks like an eggplant, but I’ve been eating a lot of eggplant lately and I’m probably biased.

I extricated myself from the thicket and drove off to deliver more papers on my maze-like route.

Larry