FUNERALIZE

[Lynne Murphy]

Well, I grew up in a funeral home in small-town western NY and count myself as
being sensitive to funeral language, and I'm not familiar w/ funeralize.
Flexner & Soukhanov's _Speaking Freely_ has a chapter on funeral lg, even w/ a
discussion of African-American funeral lg, and it also doesn't mention it.
But DARE has it, recording it as South/South-Midland--no mention of ethnicity.
This wouldn't surprise me because funerals seem a bit different in north &
south.

Lynne

P2052 at AOL.COM wrote:

> Has the verb, "funeralize" (which I've heard all my life in the
> African-American community-- even in the speech of educated Blacks), been
> recognized/ acknowledged by any legitimate sources?  I heard the word so
> often when I was growing up that you can imagine my surprise to discover (in
> an advanced grammar class in graduate school) that the word was not in any
> dictionary.  Even then, I tried to argue that no other word effectively
> captures all that is implied by the terrm.  If you know of any sources where
> this term appears, please let me know ASAP.
>                                     PAT WILLIAMS

--

M. Lynne Murphy, Assistant Professor in Linguistics
Department of English, Baylor University
PO Box 97404, Waco, TX 76798 USA
Phone:  254-710-6983     Fax:  254-710-3894
http://www.baylor.edu/~M_Lynne_Murphy