VITAL STATISTICS
Reading edition
In writing obituaries the reporter must use the greatest care, for it is very easy to offend the family of the subject of the obituary. Avoid the conventional euphemisms.
Prefer:
body to remains
send body to ship body
coffin to casket
flowers to floral offerings
funeral to obsequies
widow to wife
burial to interment
the dead man to deceased or defunct
Avoid:
the late
late residence
solemn black
sable hearse
last sad rites
Marriage is a state. The ceremony is a wedding. Don't marry the man to the woman. The woman is always married to the man.
Don't say a marriage was consummated.
Funeral means interment. Write: Funeral services were held at the church and burial was in Evergreen Cemetery.
Do not use heart failure for heart disease. All persons die because the heart fails to beat.
Write simply, he died, and not passed away, shuffled off this mortal coil, gave up the ghost, or any similarly amateurish phrase. There is no occasion for clothing the incident of death in a panoply of words, nor should birth be written of except simply. Do not say, a little stranger was ushered into a cold world, but a child was born. In writing of vital statistics—death, birth, marriage—be content to state the facts without unnecessary embellishment. Forget about the stork, the grim reaper, Hymen and Cupid.
A DICTIONARY
Wrote Sir Clifford Allbutt: "A dictionary 'sanctions' nothing of its contents, but it enables us by consultation of its stores to compare and choose for ourselves. In using this liberty we shall neither be subservient to the prescriptions of age, nor scornful of modern freedom; in every use we shall be guided by historical growth, the example of the best authors, and our present necessities."
SCOURGE OF EVIL DOERS . . . EXPOSER OF SECRET INIQUITIES . . . UNRELENTING FOE OF PRIVILEGE AND CORRUPTION.