Homegoing

Sun Mar 9 16:25:35 UTC 2008

Does "homegoing" come from an earlier belief among slaves that the
dead went back to Africa?

Joel

At 3/9/2008 06:06 AM, Margaret Lee wrote:
>Sometimes the term "homegoing service" is also used in the African
>American community to refer to the funeral, the idea that the
>deceased is going home to be with the Lord: 'Sister Rose's homegoing
>service will be held on Tuesday at noon.'
>
>   Margaret Lee
>
>"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
>   On Mar 8, 2008, at 11:22 AM, Damien Hall wrote:
>
> > Spotted last night in an obituary:
> >
> > 'He was funeralized February 26, 2008, at Resurrection Baptist
> > Church [...]'
> >
> > (_Westside Weekly_ (Philadelphia, PA, USA), 7-13 March 2008, p8)
> >
> > This clearly means 'his funeral was held', 'he was given a
> > funeral'; it was a
> > new one on me and didn't appear (in this sense) in either of the
> > dictionaries I
> > was able to consult:
> >
> > - _OED_ online has a citation from 1654 for _funeralize_ meaning
> > 'render sad or
> > melancholy'; this is the only citation and the word is marked
> > 'obscure'.
> > - The word didn't feature in _MW Online_ or in the _MW Collegiate_
> > (which may,
> > for all I know, contain the same data!).
> > - The _MW_ website said that there was an entry for _funeralize_ in
> > the
> > unabridged version at merriam-websterunabridged.com, but neither I
> > nor my U.
> > library has a subscription to that.
>
>Dictionary.com Unabridged (based on the Random House Unabridged) has
>it in this sense:
>
>http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/funeralized
>
> > A new one for the _OED_, or a nonce-word? Has anyone else come
> > across it? This
> > citation is from the free local paper of the area where I live in West
> > Philadelphia, which is 99% African-American; does that have any
> > bearing?
>
>from http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/13503.html
>
>"To funeralize" is a verb unique to black English and I like it. It
>refers to the formal rituals for burial that survive in a more robust
>way among African Americans than among the rest of us. It can be used
>actively ("We funeralized Brother Johnson last week.") or passively
>("Brother Johnson was funeralized last week."), with past, present and
>future tenses.
>
>...
>
>fair number of hits describing funeral rituals (most, if not all, for
>african americans), plus some commenting, in an amazed way, at the
>verb. and, right here on ADS-L:
>
>Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 19:39:42 EDT
>Sender: American Dialect Society Mailing List
>Subject: FUNERALIZE
>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
>
>http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9910d&L=ads-l&P=845
>
>Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 18:58:35 -0500
>Sender: American Dialect Society Mailing List
>From: Lynne Murphy
>Subject: Re: FUNERALIZE
>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.
>
>http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9910D&L=ADS-L&P=R411&I=-3
>
>Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 21:15:37 -0400
>Sender: American Dialect Society Mailing List
>From: David Barnhart
>Subject: Re: FUNERALIZE
>Check W3, p 922, col. 1 about half way down. labeled "dial." OED has
>an entry (only one quote from 1654) meaning "to render sad or
>melancholy." Regards, David Barnhart
>
>
>http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9910D&L=ADS-L&P=R452&I=-3
>
>Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 13:19:17 -0500
>Sender: American Dialect Society Mailing List
>From: Joan Houston Hall
>Subject: Re: crick
>... And if you'll open Volume II [of DARE] to page 601, you'll find
>nice entries for "funeralize" and "funeralizing."
>
>http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9910D&L=ADS-L&P=R1573&I=-3
>
>Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 20:33:44 EDT
>
>Sender: American Dialect Society Mailing List
>
>Subject: Re: FUNERALIZE
>That is not the meaning of the word when used in the African-American
>community. As I explained to my instructor at Auburn University,
>funeralize means, simply, "to perform the last rites" (from the
>minister's standpoint) or "to have the last rites perfomed" (from the
>standpoint of family members), followed by the burial (either in whole
>or in part). In my forty-something years, I've never heard the term
>used in the sense which you describe. (And, believe me, as a church
>musician, I have heard the term a whole lot.)
>
>Interestingly enough, though, the term is not synonymous with
>memorialize (which connotes honor [and not everyone "funeralized" is
>so deserving]; nor is it synonymous with bury or inter, both of which
>refer simply to the final stage of the ritual. PAT WILLIAMS
>
>http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9910D&L=ADS-L&P=R3277&I=-3
>
>Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 11:56:01 -0500
>Sender: American Dialect Society Mailing List
>From: Lynne Murphy
>Subject: funeralize, again
>... I was just sorting through my files ... and found an article to
>which I'd affixed a post-it that said "funeralize"--I'd forgotten that
>I'd read about the word before. The article is "A partial Black word
>list from East Texas" by Ann R. B. Heald, which appeared in
>_Linguistic and literary studies in honor of Archibald A. Hill" (1979,
>Mouton). ... What it says about "funeralize" is that it's commonly
>used by Black people, and known by White people, but not used
>seriously by them.
>
>http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9911A&L=ADS-L&P=R2078&I=-3
>
>(then a query from Barbara Hill Hudson on 4 Feb. 2006 and a reply from
>Margaret Lee on 5 Feb., saying that it's a common terrm in the AA
>community.)
>
>
>
>
>
>and from Pam Wilson's Grammar Guides:
>
>Friday, March 24, 2006
>
>On the language of death
>The obituaries we publish intrigue me. I mean the obituaries that
>funeral homes or families write. Where we journalists would plainly
>write that someone "died," these obituary writers sometimes write that
>the person "went to his heavenly reward," "transitioned into the
>heavenly host" or "passed away peacefully." I think those rather
>euphemistic phrases are fine and probably accurately describe how the
>families see the death of their loved ones. ("Loved one" is a
>euphemism, too, but I like its all-purpose nature.) Besides, those
>obituaries are paid notices, and the families can write what they want
>within the bounds of decency.
>
>A reader asked me recently about the word funeralize. He wondered if
>it was a "real" word. I thought it was funeral industry jargon; my
>reader thought it was dialect. Indeed, dictionaries I consulted list
>funeralize and define it as "to hold or attend a funeral." The word
>has been in the language since the 17th century. At least a couple of
>Internet sources attribute the word to African-American dialect, and
>one cited Zora Neale Hurston. A Internet version of H.L. Mencken's
>"The American Language" credits "the backwoods pulpit" with the word.
>Another Internet source cited Edwin Newman. The journalist sharply
>criticizedfuneralize as a non-word.
>
>I won't use funeralize, but others will. We journalists will stick to
>the plain "hold a funeral."
>
>http://blogs.newsobserver.com/grammar/index.php?m=200603
>
>also, of course, on the Verbing of America site:
>
>http://www.ar.cc.mn.us/raygor/rdrverbs.htm
>
>Mencken:
>
>http://www.bartleby.com/185/pages/page91.html
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
>
>
>---------------------------------
>Looking for last minute shopping deals?  Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org