Adam Aleksik

How many of you are familiar with the word unalive as a synonym of kill?

Show of hands.

Okay, like 80% of you.

Great.

Now, follow-up question.

How many of you have heard the word unalive being used in person?

Okay, I'm getting like 40, 50%.

Great.

Those of you that said no clearly aren't middle school teachers.

If you spend enough time around seventh and eighth graders, you will hear them using the word.

It'll mostly be in informal situations, but could show up in contexts like a student's essay on Hamlet's contemplation of unaliving himself, or a classroom discussion on the unaliving that happens in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

And these aren't hypothetical situations.

These are actual examples drawn from the thousand plus middle school teachers I've surveyed about this word.

It's a weird hobby of mine, I don't know.

Clearly, for such a recent word, unalive shows up in an impressive range of scenarios.

But the main function appears to be euphemistic.

Many kids use the word when they're uncomfortable talking about topics like death, since unalive sounds like a less scary word.

And in many ways, this is nothing new.

We've been euphemizing death as long as we've had language.

The word deceased, for example, comes from Latin , which was a euphemism for the previous Latin word for death, morse.