From the Sacramento Bee
By Carlos Alcalá
Death is hard to find in death notices.
This is the time of year – January and February – when death rates are generally highest, according to the National Vital Statistics System.
The Bee and other newspapers tend to run more paid death notices at this time of year, too.
If you read those notices carefully, however, you'll find many people in them didn't exactly die.
Most of them "passed away."...
"Death is hard to deal with," said University of California, Berkeley, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, explaining why people avoid the four-letter word that starts with 'd' – died.
"This is one reality that's hard to face head-on," he said. "It happens in the Bible; it happened in Homer."