Last week I read a news story about an apparent murder-suicide that had happened in the U.S. Except it wasn’t reported as being a murder-suicide. Instead, the police chief was quoted as referring to it as possibly being “a murder-[expletive].”
I have to admit that when I first read this I did a double take. I couldn’t figure out what the police chief had said. It took a couple of moments for the penny to drop.
Was this an example of the “language police” riding again? Apparently it’s been considered wrong for a while now to say “committed suicide” because “commit” implies or suggests that suicide is a sin or a crime, as this is how it’s been looked on in the past, albeit not recently. And by “not recently” I mean probably not in many people’s memory.
There’s still some stigma attached to suicide, but this has more to do with the act itself than the language. But let’s stick with the word. As the medical director for The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention puts it: “We wouldn’t say commit cancer or a heart attack. It implies something that’s willful and morally reprehensible.”
This sounds fair, though I still don’t think I’d want to ban the use of the expression outright. And thinking about it more deeply, I’m not sure the analogy holds. Cancer and a heart attack aren’t acts. People don’t do a heart attack or cancer. Saying that suicide isn’t a “willful” act is also problematic. Surely in some cases, like medically-assisted suicide in this country, it is profoundly willful. To say otherwise would be to deny personal agency in what is an agonizing decision over how to end one’s life.
But the news story went further, choosing to see the word suicide as an “expletive.” This is where things got interesting for me. Let’s take a couple of dictionary definitions of “expletive”:
Merriam-Webster:
a syllable, word, or phrase inserted to fill a vacancy (as in a sentence or a metrical line) without adding to the sense
an exclamatory word or phrase, especially one that is obscene or profane
Wikipedia:
An expletive is a word or phrase inserted into a sentence that is not needed to express the basic meaning of the sentence. It is regarded as semantically null or a placeholder. Expletives are not insignificant or meaningless in all senses; they may be used to give emphasis or tone, to contribute to the meter in verse, or to indicate tense.
The primary definition comes from the Latin expletivus, meaning to fill out or take up space. The secondary meaning defines it as a word considered to be offensive, a profanity or curse.
Now I’ll be honest and say I didn’t even know the primary meaning of expletive as a placeholder. For people my age I think the word expletive first came into public consciousness with the release of the expurgated transcripts of the Oval Office tapes of Richard Nixon, which made famous the phrase “expletive deleted.” My father had a political cartoon of Nixon swearing his oath of office with one hand on the Bible and the oath itself peppered with “expletive deleteds.” I’ll never forget it.
So what has happened is that the word “suicide” has been redefined as an expletive, something offensive to be deleted from reported speech. Not just “committing suicide,” but the suicide itself. Unfortunately, what this has resulted in, at least online, is an awkward grasping for euphemisms or circumlocutions to fill the gap. Most of these have been, frankly, ridiculous. Self-deletion? Or, even worse, “unalive”?
In 2024 Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture actually got in trouble for rewriting a Nirvana exhibit to say that Kurt Cobain had “un-alived himself” rather than “died by suicide.” There was a public backlash to that and it had to be corrected, but the fuss underlined what has become a digital-age phenomenon. The thing is, digital media platforms, most prominently YouTube, can and do demonetize content that runs afoul of speech codes. Which is why, watching some videos or listening to podcasts, you’ll hear certain words blanked out or else substituted for something less likely to trigger the algorithm.
This has become so prevalent that the resulting language even has its own name: algospeak. This refers to the code words that are used to evade automated or human moderation. “Unalive” is one such example.
Algospeak has its critics. Some people in the suicide prevention community, for example, see it as potentially confusing individuals who may be looking for help and who can’t decode the new slang. But it’s interesting to see the forces at work that push language to evolve.
Are we better off today than when I was a kid? In public and high school kids in my generation listened to songs like Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution” and Queen’s “Don’t Try Suicide.” I can still remember in grade 7 or 8 hearing the latter come on at a dance:
Don’t try suicide, nobody’s worth it
Don’t try suicide, nobody cares
Don’t try suicide, you’re just gonna hate it
Don’t try suicide, nobody gives a damn
A teacher who was standing nearby turned to one of his fellow teachers and laughingly remarked: “Nobody gives a damn? That’s not being very positive.” And that’s as far as things went back in the day. Were we made stronger by listening to such lyrics? Or damaged by them? Osbourne was actually sued after someone listening to “Suicide Solution” killed himself but the claim failed at trial. On the broader question of the role language plays in such cases, the jury’s still out.
Alex Good 