"funeralize"?

[CTyankee]

I heard that term twice this morning on MSNBC. I looked it up in my dictionary and it was not there.

Then, on to Google. Yes, it is a word! Actually, a very old word dating back to the 1600s.

See here: http://writefully.blogspot.com/2010/06/she-be-funeralized-what.html

But can a dead person be funeralized? According to the Google piece it means
"to conduct a funeral."

What are your thoughts on this word's usage?

[malaise]

1. I don't think a dead person can be funeralized

not if it means 'to conduct a funeral'.

[CTyankee]

3. I see your point but in a way it could mean "to have a funeral conducted over."

I heard it used as "his body was funeralized." I know it's an odd construction and my college English professor would be in a state of shock today over it.
And the Internet has a way of normalizing language usage very quickly...

[malaise]

6. I guess it could

but I'd never use it.

The word that has shocked me most in recent years is 'medaled'. Nothing will allow me to accept it as a verb.
Maybe I'm just old.

[Glorfindel]

8. As in, "He medaled in the Olympics?" I agree with you. Never a verb!

What next? His cow "blue-ribboned" at the county fair?

[malaise]

9. Yep

We can blame sportscasters for that one.

[CTyankee]

10. There's a certain logic that I see in "medaled." But come to think of it, it's pretty

awful usage...

[malaise]

20. The logic is what I call

'lazy speak'.

That said a good friend's grandson asked us recently if we could translate emojis.
They provide a language for a new generation that most of us don't understand.

[3catwoman3]

12. Years ago, the late great Edwin Newman, in one...

...of his 2 delightful books about proper and clear language use (Strictly Speaking and A Sharp Tongue), decried the so-called verb "authored."

He pointed out that no one ever said an artist "paintered" a picture. Indeed not.

Maybe we are old, but we are also right -

[TeeYiYi]

26. I woke up this morning...

...still pondering "funeralize" and feeling less confident about its legitimacy. (Damn you, CTyankee.)

The struggle came down to the fact that no matter what definition of "funeral" I used to try to justify it, I couldn't get away from the fact that a funeral is still a ceremony; a ritual.

In an attempt to create a rule for it, I started again with "funeral" synonyms: burial, entombment, interment - the ritual placing of a corpse in a grave. Here's how it went:

If a funeral can be defined as, or pertaining to the ritual placing of a corpse in the ground, then you could say that there is a need to funeralize a corpse; cause a burial to happen. Since a corpse is a person, albeit a dead person, then you could say, once buried, that a person has been funeralized.

If a person can be crystallized, i.e, Lot's wife, then, a dead person should be able to be funeralized.

I'm still not there; not quite comfortable yet... (All this stretching is wearing me out.) I'll give it one more shot:

I keep coming back to a funeral being a ritual. I'm not sure a person can be ritualized. If a person can be said to have completed a particular rite of passage, can it be said that the person has been ritualized?

According to the definition of "ritualize," the answer is yes. (See below: 3. impose ritualism upon)

ritualize
[rich-oo-uh-lahyz]

verb (used without object), ritualized, ritualizing.
1.
to practice ritualism.
verb (used with object), ritualized, ritualizing.
2.
to make into a ritual :
to ritualize the serving of tea.
3.
to convert (someone) to ritualism; impose ritualism upon.

So, there it is. If a person, who has had a ritual imposed upon them, can be said to have been ritualized, then a person who has had a funeral imposed upon them can be said to have been funeralized.

The etymology of "funeralize" makes more sense if you allow for early European translations, both singular and plural, of the Latin root word, "funus." The word, "funeralize," could have origins in multiple countries across Europe, e.g., England, France, Spain, Portugal; brought to America and passed down through the generations.

Thanks again, CTyankee. This time, I really am done; even if I'm wrong. FIN

TYY

[Glorfindel]

2. I really don't like the word. But I suppose it's no worse than "eulogize" or "memorialize"

If I were using it, I'd say something like, "The priest (or pastor) did a creditable job in funeralizing the deceased." But, in actual practice, it's not a word I'd ever use.

[CTyankee]

4. I think "eulogize" and "memorialize" are very well accepted and are in my

American Heritage Dictionary. Perhaps "funeralize" will be going forward...

[Turbineguy]

5. Getting ready for you now....

With Trumpcare, funerals will become a bigger part of American life. We will industrialize it and develop jargon.

Like: "Crestructors". People who build crematoriums (or is that crematoria?).

[CTyankee]

7. The people using it today were good liberals. They were saying it respectfully.

One of them was Rev. Al on his show.

"Crematoria" is used IIRC. It's in my dictionary.

[oswaldactedalone]

11. Two of the most segregated places

still in existence are churches and funeral homes. Funeralized is a word commonly used among African-Americans to describe the process involved in scheduling and implementing the visitation, funeral service, and burial. My wife has owned a florist for 20 years and I've helped her out enough to have talked to staff at every funeral home in our city. The black-owned funeral homes are the only ones who use that term.

[CTyankee]

13. Yes, IIRC the other person who used the the term was an African-American...

so I see it as a properly used word. My white English professor would probably initially protest but would accept it. She accepted the word f--- in a poem a student wrote in our creative writing course. Even tho I cannot image her using it. she has published two books on English usage.

[janx]

15. Yes. If you find the word in Merriam Webster,

it is listed as dialectal--a regional or social language variation.


Definition of funeralize

-ed/-ing/-s
dialectal
:to hold a funeral or memorial service for: put off funeralizing him

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/funeralize


If it has entered news speak, however, I'm sure we'll be hearing it again, possibly ad infinitum.

[Igel]

14. It's not revived.

It's dialectal. Can't find any info on its geographic or social restrictions. Sometimes dialects hold on to older words, sometimes they don't. In this case, the meanings are different enough and the morphology transparent and frequent enough that current existence doesn't require continuity with the past. Given the break in time and space and the difference in meaning, I'll go with it being a neologism at some point.

For "hold a funeral for" NSOED gives it as 19th century until 1869. It's possible somebody's trying to revive it; if so, I hope to see that attempt buried. NSOED isn't omniscient, of course.

Mencken spoke of it as a neologism, along with "vacationize" and "picturize". That may be a result of his local context--it may be that "funeralize" was a recent dialectal import and had the same form as neologisms.

Might be a new neologism.

A lot of the recent neologisms I hear are people trying to show how educated or trendy they are. Sometimes they're basically figures, for effect, but not nearly as often as I'd like. Instead, they're just hypercorrection, and that accounts for both dialectal forms and the tendency to ubertrendify.

[CTyankee]

16. I wouldn't call it a neologism since neo means new and if anything this is an old

term. I think it just has been revived.

What do you think about "visualize" and "pictorialize"?

[janx]

17. Yeah, but it's a transitive verb.

So you can't just kick back and funeralize. You have to funeralize someone. Let's see if the talking heads grasp that...

[malaise]

21. You nailed it

[TeeYiYi]

27. I don't know...

Lot's wife was kicking back, crystallizing... until she wasn't.

There's a cemetery joke that references people "dying to get in there." Maybe, the older we get, we're all just funeralizing; kicked back or otherwise.

Re: Your other post, referencing the media, legitimizing bad words; I'll never forgive them for "nookular."

TYY

[janx]

29. I understand that language changes.

But there's a difference between changing language and people who are supposed to be communication professionals who don't know the difference.



So thanks.

[Thirties Child]

18. Sounds like another made-up word from the Internets

My vote is always for the simplest easiest way to say it. I think that the less educated are often far more eloquent than the over educated. When my job was to turn social worker language into English, organizationalization won the prize for most amazing word. Limitate for limit didn't stand a chance. Funeralize may be Elizabethan (or post-Elizabethan?), but it sounds like it's from the same kind of mind that spawned organizationalization.

[CTyankee]

19. "organizationalize" is horrible. Limitate doesn't make any sense. Limit works

just fine. From what I have read "funeralize" has some historical support. Plus it is used to this day in the African American community. History and usage are two tests for legitimacy in my view.

[Initech]

22. Someone really needs to start a band and call it "funeralized".

[Orrex]

23. I want to vomitize this euphemism

[grantcart]

25. you confiscatized my answer.

[janx]

30. That leaves me comfortized.

Just knowing that someone else likes those Latin suffixes makes my day. I try to utilize them whenever I can. Do you?

[TeeYiYi]

24. "funeralize"...

The word strikes me as being regional jargon; an idiomatic expression that, prior to today, would not have passed muster in a game of Scrabble.

To come to terms with its usage, you have to identify the various definitions of "funeral" and then decide which one fits and whether or not it can be reasonably 'ized.'

To 'ize' something is to cause it to be more like something else, both literally and figuratively. In some cases, the end result is meant to be more exact, e.g., to crystallize a point would mean to give it more clarity, whereas, to crystallize a liquid would mean to turn it into actual crystals.

In my mind, a funeral is an event; a multi-faceted ceremony, meant to eulogize and finalize one's death. With this definition, you could "funeralize" a non-funeral event but not a person. That said, I can better understand the etymology of the term if I dig a little deeper into the definition of "funeral"...

To "funeralize" a person, you would have to define "funeral" as the sum of its parts. As such, the physical act of "laying a person to rest," through burial in the ground or scattering of ashes, is where the funeral becomes the person and can therefore be 'ized,' as it were.

I believe the word, "funeralize," was intentionally spoken in the situational vernacular, as a show of solidarity and respect for the family of Sgt. La David Johnson; in light of the social polarization of recent, unsavory events.

Thank you, CTyankee, for your thread and for making "funeralize" the word of the day.

TYY

Disclaimer: All of this is just me trying to rationalize "funeralize" and is not meant as a treatise on the subject; hence, the freewheeling hybrid quotes.

[ancianita]

28. I first encountered it in the 70's, used by the black community where I worked. It's odd, but

as a high school and college English teacher, I've appreciated that the English language is is so organic and dynamic that I'm willing to "verbize" a noun that's verbalized as a verb.

Other examples probably precede it.