Lisa Graham-Wisener, Queen’s University Belfast
When it comes to talking about death, we have no shortage of euphemisms. This is perhaps most famously illustrated in Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch from 1971. A pet shop worker insists to a customer that his new parrot is “not dead but resting, stunned, pining for the fjords, kipping on his back, tired and shagged out after a long squawk”. The customer responds: “It is an ex-parrot, deceased, gone to the choir invisible, is pushing up the daisies, demised, passed on, is no more, has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to see its maker, is a bereft of life, late parrot that rests in peace.”
