‘Unalived’ by a Thousand Cuts

If you haven’t yet encountered the term “unalive” as an awkward and marginally grammatical synonym for “dead,” don’t worry. You will. As Nicole Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics at University of California, Berkeley put it in an interview with CNN last August, the word “is likely here to stay.”

Comedian George Carlin once sagely noted that language is a tool for concealing the truth. To illustrate his point, he traced the evolution of the names we’ve given to the condition afflicting combat soldiers who’ve been pushed to the breaking point. In World War I, it was the simple, direct “shellshock.” In World War II it became “battle fatigue.” During the Korean War it morphed into “operational exhaustion,” and after Vietnam it culminated in “post-traumatic stress disorder.” If that wasn’t vague and clumsy enough, the snappy acronym “PTSD” left it sounding like a Midwestern utility company. With each generation, we softened the language, distancing ourselves from the reality of mental trauma, almost completely removing humans from the equation.

As a species, we are terrified by pretty much everything — disease, people who aren’t like us, sex, ideas — but Americans have always been masters of coining new, passive euphemisms to buffer us from the ugly truth. It’s a psychological game, a self-delusional sleight of hand, as if we think a new, friendlier name will act like a magic incantation to hide us from life’s scarier realities. In more recent decades, the impulse to add more words to the Newspeak dictionary feels less like an effort to shield defenseless souls from hurtful labels than an attempt to protect ourselves from situations that make us uncomfortable. 

In the 1950s, it was decided “mentally retarded” would be a more sensitive replacement for “feeble minded.” Following seven or eight subsequent permutations of the proper and acceptable euphemism, we’ve now settled on the cheery “special needs.” After being in common usage for as long as anyone can remember, over the course of the 20th century “cripple” has gone through countless corrections before landing comfortably on today’s upbeat “differently abled.” “Bums” and “vagrants” became “homeless,” which itself is presently being displaced by “unhoused.” All of these terms and a hundred others enter the public lexicon, where they hold exclusive sway until the next, gentler replacement arrives.

The Newspeak dictionary has grown exponentially in the 21st century with the emergence of the most easily offended and hypersensitive generations to date, who are threatened at every turn by myriad trigger words. When a culture becomes terrified of words, it’s in deep shit.

Which, like everything else in life, brings us to death.

In America we’ve turned the fear of death into a multibillion-dollar industry, and we’re willing to fork over outrageous sums for the convenience of pretending death doesn’t exist. We want the corpse whisked away and hidden behind closed doors so we don’t have to think about it until it reappears cleaned and dressed and posed like it’s sleeping. “Undertakers” became “morticians” became “funeral directors.” The language we use in polite conversation dances around the cold finality of it all with phrases like “passed away,” “departed,” “crossed over,” “lost the battle,” “eternal peace” and “promoted to glory.” Still though, for all the fancy footwork, the words “dead,” “death,” “die,” “killed” and “suicide” are still with us, though now certain forces are trying to remedy that.

The term “unalive” as a substitute for “death” first began cropping up on social media in 2021,  but its etymology stretches back long before that, and the history of its current usage is an interesting one. 

As a synonym for “zombie” and “vampire,” the term “undead” can be found in mid-19th century horror fiction. It’s not that big a leap then to imagine “unalive” as a synonym not for the living dead, but the plain old dead-dead, or maybe the pre-undead. As simple and funny as that could be, I don’t recall ever encountering “unalive” in any context until recently. It’s believed its first contemporary appearance in pop culture arose in a 2013 episode of the animated series “Ultimate Spider-Man,” in which the character Deadpool, compelled to avoid using the word “kill,” instead announces he was going to “unalive” someone. For the next several years the usage of “unalive” (and variants “unalived,” “unaliveness,” “unalivedly” etc.) was confined to online comic book geek circles where it usually referred to people who were cold, emotionless or low-energy. Then in 2021, it began cropping up on TikTok. The ironic thing was that in its early usage it wasn’t a euphemism to shield the delicate, but a way of sticking it to The Man.  

TikTok’s code of online conduct prohibits the use of not just obscene and racist language, but several trigger words that may disturb or upset some users. Other social media sites were more lenient when it came to language, but TikTok’s rules edged toward the draconian. The use of the forbidden words could result in having a post swiftly flagged or deleted altogether. Users, however, learned they could sneak under the censorial algorithmic radar by employing deliberate misspellings or inoffensive code words which in context still got the idea across. “Sex,” for instance, became “six” while “rape” became “grape” or “SA” (shorthand for the equally banned “sexual assault”). During the pandemic, when the national mood took a seriously dark turn, young TikTok users began using “unalived” as a stealthy replacement for “suicide.”      

Holliday told CNN that while there are a number of people on TikTok posting sincere videos to help people who are dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts, the problem was overcoming the site’s strict content moderation. “They want to keep making these videos,” she said. “But they also want them to get to that audience.”

Not surprisingly, by 2023 “unalive” began spreading to other social media sites, and as it did its definition broadened. What had been a default substitute for “suicide” exclusively soon came to be a catch-all substitute for myriad death-related trigger words like “murder.” Also, instead of a sneaky workaround to dodge censorship, “unalive” lost all its guile and became the preferred acceptable online euphemism for “death.”

While most online slang has a mercifully brief lifespan during which it remains confined to the internet, “unalive” seems to be making a rare jump into mainstream American usage. English and history teachers are reporting that more and more students have been using “unalive” in papers to avoid talking directly about, say, the fates of half the characters in “Hamlet.” This year, there was a bit of a kerfuffle when Seattle’s Pop Culture Museum rewrote a placard on a Kurt Cobain exhibit to read: “Kurt Cobain un-alived himself at 27.”

In past decades, as politically correct terms like “differently abled” entered the public lexicon, they were initially lampooned as ludicrous and comically hypersensitive warpings of the language. Over time, however, many of these latest-generation euphemisms have since become accepted and reflexive, and anyone who doesn’t use the current preferred term can expect to be rebuffed or shunned as, um, a “special needs” Neanderthal. It’s conceivable, then, that “unalive” might well take on the same power in the coming years.

That leads to at least three potential problems.

D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians” and Brazil nuts were all once known by different names. When those original names fell out of cultural favor, they were promptly changed. Americans are just as good at rewriting history as they are at coining awkward euphemisms, both designed to cushion us from those things we fear and others we would rather not admit. If “unalive” takes hold, will the time come when we’ll be forced to go back and recast titles? Will George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” become “Night of the Alive Unalive”? Will another Agatha Christie novel be known as “Unalived on the Nile”? Will we find ourselves confronted with unalive car batteries on cold mornings? 

That may, I hope, be an exaggeration, but there remain two more problems that seem inevitable. What happens, for instance, when TikTok and other social media sites recalibrate their moderation algorithms to recognize “unalive”? And what happens when “unalive” itself comes to be considered a trigger word? 

It’s a moot point, anyway. We could refer to death as “Todd” if we liked, but it still won’t save us from you-know-who.