dying a death

[Robin Hamilton]

> I tend to react with curiosity rather than prescriptivism to expressions
> I find unfamiliar. And "dying a death" jumped at me as
> tautological--something that a Russian speaker would refer to as
> "?????-????????" ("maslo maslianoe"--buttered butter).
>
> A quick search revealed a number of similar recent uses, including a
> 2006 "Dying a death" paper by a Latrobe University researcher Allan
> Kellehear.

        [SNIP]

> It looks like mostly British use, the Australian paper (published in
> Tokyo) notwithstanding. I checked GB and could find not one example that
> was unmodified (or was not a false positive due to ignored punctuation),
> so it is strictly recent UK periodicals, blogs and comments of recent
> vintage. A snowclone in the making?
>
>     VS-)

Sounds like a recent variant of the phrase (or cliché) "dying the death" or
"died the death".  (1,610,000 goggle hits for "dying the death" vs. 375,000
for "dying a death".)  Usually something which expires slowly, never the
literal sense of death, and possibly connected with the showbiz use of
talking about a play or show dying when it bombs.

The original is so familiar in the UK that I wouldn't have thought twice if
I came on it, and confronted by "dying a death," I'd think it was someone
trying to be clever and extend the original slightly.

Strange that it doesn't run in America -- is there a USA equivalent?

Robin

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